He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.
The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
’ … he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same … ‘
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried: ‘I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.’
‘What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.’
Shasta’s heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
‘Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars … in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one … we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.’
‘So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventures. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.’
‘Go and wake the others and tell them to follow. If they will not, then you at least must follow me alone.’
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.’
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
‘You people with hearts,’ he said, ‘have something to guide you, and need never do wrong.’
As a drop draws to water, so my Soul drew near to the Great Soul which is beyond all things…I saw every camp and village, to the least, where we have ever rested. I saw them at one time and in one place; for they were within the Soul. By this I knew the Soul had passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things. By this I knew that I was free.
