Quotes from Charles Williams

The moon was bright; he stood at the edge of his own skull's platform; desire to hate and desire not to hate struggled in him. In the moonlight, visible, audible, arm in arm, talking and laughing, they came. He saw them pass; his eyes grew blind. Presently he turned and went home. That night when at last he slept he dreamed, more clearly than ever before, of his steady descent of the moon-bright rope.

Because then I might have known whether the light's in the sun or the sun's in the light.

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.

Why was this bloody world created?" "As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever." " [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative.

It's said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That's of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it's said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.

Nothing was certain, but everything was safe - that was part of the mystery of Love.

Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.

I hope you still think that ideas are more dangerous than material thing," Quentin said. "That is what you were arguing at lunch." Anthony pondered while glancing from side to side before he answered, "Yes, I do. All material danger is limited, whereas interior danger is unlimited. It's more dangerous for you to hate than kill, isn't it?

They're beautiful hands," he said; "though they've ruined the world, they're beautiful hands.

I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.

but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.

She endured her own nature and supposed it to be the burden of another's.

Why isn't one taught how to be loved? Why isn't one taught anything?

A man cannot love himself; he can only idolize it, and over the idol delightfully tyrannize - without purpose. The great gift which the simple idolatry of self gives is lack of further purpose

There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.

I will not seek it," the other replied. "It has been opened once and it is enough. And you -- are you sure that man can conquer until he has been wholly defeated? Are you sure that he can find plenitude till he has known utter despair? You will not let him despair of himself, but it may be that only in such a complete despair he finds that which cannot despair and is something other than man.

the war between good and evil existed no longer, for the thing beneath the Graal was not fighting but vomiting.

Over the white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, said Jonathan, "once alluded to 'common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art.

So long always as joy was not rashly pinned to the happening; so long as you accepted what joys the universe offered and did not seek to compel the universe to offer you joys of your own definition.

Pardon,Periel, like Love, is only ours for fun: essentially we don't and can't.

The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately. The converts had known a first coming. And then? And then! That was the trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as universal and as durable — as time.

Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.