C. S. Lewis Quotes

I'm pretty sure that I was JFK in my past life.

Our bodies will be recycled one way or another, but what about our ideas and minds and characters? Primordial soup? The bourne from which no traveller returns? Interesting and exciting.

I live for now, not for what happens after I die.

When I die, I want to come back as me.

I'm petrified of reincarnation because, you know, I like being me.

I don't like to think of myself as just a person. I don't think I am. I think I existed before, and I think I'll exist again after I die here, so I don't exactly know what I am. I don't think there is ever going to be an answer. I just know that I'm not like you.

Would you know my name, if I saw you in Heaven?

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

These are only outer symptoms. Death is the transfer of the soul from one body to another body, or in cases when a man is fully awakened, from one body to the body of the whole universe. It is a great journey, but you cannot know it from the outside. From outside, only symptoms are available; and those symptoms have made people afraid.

Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted. (132)

Here's what happens when you die--you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that when you die, nothing cool happens.

To love is to undress our names.

She smiled, pulling the photo a little closer, and I wondered if I should ask her, too, the question for my project, get her definition. But as she ran a finger slowly across the faces, identifying each one, it occurred to me that maybe this was her answer. All those names, strung together like beads on a chain. Coming together, splitting apart, but still and always, a family. (page 289) ~Ruby

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Harry taught me that death isn't the end, it's the beginning.

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

Mortality is but a stepping-stone to a more glorious existence in the future.

It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it.

Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.

I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

Enoch...why are you here? Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?

They call him Aslan in That Place," said Eustace. "What a curious name!" "Not half so curious as himself," said Eustace solemnly.

It'd be nice to have a new name, to start with, one that's not all worn out from being called so much.