A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis Quotes

For me, C.S. Lewis is difficult to quote because every sentence he writes is so full of thought and power. Here is my lousy attempt to quote some of the items that struck me the most:

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called 'resources.' People get over these things. Come I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace. (p.3-4)

...it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. (p.4)

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.

Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places {where he and H. had been happy} than anywhere else. It's not local at all...The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. (P.11)

But won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. (p.18)

Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process...Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. (p. 60)

For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode--like a holiday--that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal--something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus H. would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that.

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one. (p. 61)

But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing. (p. 62-63)

All reality is iconoclastic. (p.66)

Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there's any road to H., it runs through Him?...If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all. (p.68)

For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives--to both, but perhaps especially to the woman--a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say he sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees. (p.72)