Grief Observed Quotes

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  Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Kindness, Love Is

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

  C. S. Lewis

  Depression, God, Christian

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• For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Cutting, Loss

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.28, Faber & Faber

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• I gave in, and admitted that God was God.

  C. S. Lewis

  God, Atheist, Literature

  "Unseen CS Lewis letter defines his notion of joy" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. December 9, 2014.

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• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fear, Grief, Yawning

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.5, Faber & Faber

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• I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Sorrow, Maps

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.29, Faber & Faber

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• When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Doors, Special

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.33, Faber & Faber

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• Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Long, Valleys

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.29, Faber & Faber

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• You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

  C. S. Lewis

  Strong, Believe, Life And Death

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.13, Faber & Faber

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• We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Blessed, Reality

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• Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bereavement, Universal, Pain Of Separation

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.25, Faber & Faber

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• Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.

  C. S. Lewis

  God, Faith, Real

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.6, Faber & Faber

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• Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Grief, Sadness

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.7, Faber & Faber

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• God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Pain, Speak

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• God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

  C. S. Lewis

  House Of Cards, Order, Trying

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.26, Faber & Faber

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• When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

  C. S. Lewis

  Gratitude, Doors, Silence

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.6, Faber & Faber

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• Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Grieving, Sky

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.8, Faber & Faber

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• Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

  C. S. Lewis

  Writing, Men, Suffering

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• You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

  C. S. Lewis

  Eye, Pet, Tears

  C.S. Lewis (2014). “A Grief Observed Readers' Edition: With contributions from Hilary Mantel, Jessica Martin, Jenna Bailey, Rowan Williams, Kate Saunders, Francis Spufford and Maureen Freely”, p.25, Faber & Faber

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• Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Grief, Talking

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.14, Faber & Faber

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• It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Frustration, Hands

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.17, Faber & Faber

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• The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Voice, Giving

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• Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Order, Suffering

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

  C. S. Lewis

  Atheist, Night, England

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Yours, Jack: The Inspirational Letters of C. S. Lewis”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

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• You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Truth, Believe

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.13, Faber & Faber

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