C. S. Lewis Quotes

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.

What is death, after all? We leave only mortals behind us.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

Remember me when I am gone away, gone far away into the silent land.

So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You'll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you've read.

Life's something we already understand. Death is a mystery.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Death, of course, should not be feared, but awaited with certain wonder. To die was to step across a threshold into a new world, unknown, unimaginable.

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.

I don't believe in the afterlife, so I do think when somebody passes, it's worthy of note.

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

The religious man, the mystic, tries to explore the mystery of death. In exploring the mystery of death, he inevitably comes to know what life is, what love is. Those are not his goals. His goal is to penetrate death, because there seems to be nothing more mysterious than death. Love has some mystery because of death, and life also has some mystery because of death.

Why do people want to pretend that death is sleep? It isn't. It isn't.

Death is perfectly safe. (55)

For the living, death is thievery.

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.

When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?