A Severe Mercy: A Story Of Faith, Tragedy, And Triumph Quotes
"The magic word is sharing: every stream of beauty, every faith and grief and dream; Go hand in hand in gay companionship — In sober death no sundering of the grip."
"We know it’s love that keeps a love secure, And only by love of love can love endure, For self’s a killer, reckless of the cost, And loves of lilactime unloved are lost."
"To hold her in my arms against the twilight and be her comrade for ever—this was all I wanted so long as my life should last."
"What is beauty but something that is responded to with emotion? Courage, at least partly, is emotional. All the splendor of life."
"If we had shaped our love, and it would endure, whatever came: that we believed."
"This darling love shall deepen year by year, And dearer shall we grow who are so dear."
"We build our altar, then, to love and keep The holy flame alight and never sleep."
"The smile of inloveness seemed to promise for ever, but friends who had been in love last year were parting this year."
"We would sail the seas in storm and sunshine to far islands, carrying with us our beloved books and our few possessions."
"Between the probable and proved there yawns / A gap. Afraid to jump, we"
"I believe that a new Christian is given a special grace— joy and assurance—in the beginning, however feeble the choosing."
"One tries to rethink everything one has ever thought in this new Light."
"Not only can the doubts be coped with, not only do prayers go better, but the doubts come less often—and when they do are often met with a surge of inexplicable confidence that the Choice was right."
"Feelings surge in that it’s lies, all lies, that yonder red bus, the hard pavement under one’s heels, the glory of the may tree are the only realities."
"But one remembers that the Choice was based on reason, the weight of the evidence, and is strengthened."
"For a moment we were silent, remembering. I said, ‘Davy?’ She looked at me with bright, remembering eyes—her long lovely eyes—and I said, ‘I love you.’ ‘I know,’ she said. ‘And I love you.’"
"She knew without my saying that I was hers, that I was full of happiness that we were deeply together again, wherever the road led."
"‘Everyone who loves is the child of God,’ says John (I John IV 7). Perhaps that morning she came back for me and then perhaps, astonishingly, found herself further along the Way."
"‘Do—or do not.’ She wanted, humanly, to live; and she, humanly, feared death: yet she was surrendered to God. Her watchword, the phrase always on her lips, was: ‘All shall be most well.’"
"I discovered—one cannot reject Christianity. I cannot explain this. One discovers one cannot move a boulder by trying with all one’s strength to do it. I discovered—without any sudden influx of love or faith—that I could not reject Christianity."
"I knew on the instant of her dying that she was dead. A little dribble came out of her mouth. I wiped it away, and I shut her mouth and her eyes."
"‘Oh, dearling, look . . .’ She might have been saying ‘look’ as one who suddenly understands something, or as one who beholds—what? Her voice was so frail, I could not tell which it was."
"The Illumination of the Past was a quite incredible experience. An analogy might be something like this: one is seated in a dark room around the walls of which is a complex mural—the past — and in one’s hand is a tiny, brilliant spotlight."
"The most astonishing occurrence of my own grief was the strange thing that began to happen within a day or two of her death. It was the flooding back to me of all the other Davys I had known."
"That wholeness can only be gained by death, I believe. In the co-inherence of lovers I had seen in hospital the Christ in her—the Co-inherence."
"Time to sit on stone walls, time to see beauty, time to stare as long as sheep and cows."
"Moments precisely without the pressure of time—moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments."
"Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus."
"Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now."
"The eternal Davy, even as we hold all the David Copperfields when we have closed the book."
"Reflecting upon my perception of the total or eternal Davy, so much more completely to be known and loved."
"We wished to know, to savor, to sink in — into the heart of the experience — to possess it wholly."
"Timeless impressions, time-free moments, in Oxford, too."
"There is, in fact, some truth in ‘the good old days’: no other civilization of the past was ever so harried by time."
"The timelessness that seems to reside in the future or the past is an illusion."
"Sometimes — more precisely, some-not-times —we find ‘the still point of the turning world’."
"If eternity exists and is our home, it suggests we were created for eternity."
"We have been harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it."
"Your love for Jean must, in one sense, be ‘killed’ and ‘God must do it.’"
"Our love had to perish, Lewis says. Perish in its earthly form, at least, or perish utterly in hate or indifference."
"The Second Death is not followed by happiness. It is followed by emptiness."
"The fading of the beloved as-she-was is a necessary condition of the trans-mortal and eternal relation."
"The union thus created will, I believe, transcend death: it endures and will endure."