Quotes from Sheldon Vanauken

A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion.

Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.

You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true & how v. frequent this is!) that you were jealous of God. So from US you have been led back to US AND GOD; it remains to go on to GOD AND US.

Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

The "Appeal to Love" was an essential part of the very structure of the Shining Barrier. What it meant was simply this question: what will be best for our love? Should one of us change a pattern of behavior that bothered the other, or should the other learn to accept? Well, which would be better for our love? Which way would be better, in any choice or decision, in the light of our single goal: to be in love as long as life might last?

If I must bear it, though, I would bear it— find the whole meaning of it, taste the whole of it.

It's hard, since Noah, not to see a rainbow as a sign of hope.

Thus we were perfectly aware that the central claim of Christianity was and always had been that the same God who made the world had lived in the world and been killed by the world; and that the (claimed) proof of this was His Resurrection from the dead.

Corruption is never compulsory.

The moment was utterly timeless: we didn't know that time existed; and it contained, therefore, some foretaste, it may be, of eternity.

Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. Everything! If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it—and the other one must find it.

Heaven itself [...] would be— must be— a coming home.

Death is no respecter of love.

So it was agreed: we would while we were here seek the whole of the Oxford thing, together when we could, apart when we must. And I did, most faithfully, recount all to her, and in the end what was to prove the deepest part of our Oxford days we shared completely. One

Love can die in many ways, most of them far more terrible than physical death.

One who has never been in love might mistake either infatuation or a mixture of affection and sexual attraction for being in love. But when the 'real thing' happens, there is no doubt.

Most of the people who reject Christianity know almost nothing of what they are rejecting: those who condemn what they do not understand are, surely, little men.

Honesty is better than any easy comfort.

What was so odd was that quite a lot of people, not just sheep but highly intelligent people, did apparently believe it. T. S. Eliot, for instance. Or Eddington—in fact, quite a few physicists, the very last people one would expect to be taken in by it. Philosophers, too. Was it possible—was there any chance—that there was more to it than I had thought? No, certainly not. Of course not! Still, it was odd. Damned odd.

Her death...brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault.

The Shining Barrier—the shield of our love. A walled garden. A fence around a young tree to keep the deer from nibbling it. A fortified place with the walls and watchtowers gleaming white like the cliffs of England. The Shining Barrier—we called it so from the first—protecting the green tree of our love. And yet in another sense it was our love itself, made strong within, that was the Shining Barrier.

But why does love need to be guarded? Against what enemies? We looked about us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and war loomed gigantic. A world where love did not endure.

It must be that, whatever its promise, love does not by itself endure. But why? What was the failure behind the failure of love ?