The voices / 25 fragments

Charles Williams

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗death faith life knowledge time nature justice mind

Archive entries

01Undated

Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.

Charles Williams / quote

02Undated

The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.

Charles Williams / quote

03Undated

but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.

Charles Williams / quote

04Undated

I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.

Charles Williams / quote

05Undated

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.

Charles Williams / quote

06Undated

. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?""Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very.""Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness.""I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying, are they?""It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only agreed.""And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, "can they be good?"He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?

Charles Williams / quote

07Undated

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

Charles Williams / quote

08Undated

There was no way to kiss her like a good boy. You could start out that way, but you always ended up on the other side of the tracks. If you hated her, it didn’t make any difference; it worked just the same.

Charles Williams / quote

09Undated

Her mouth was soft and moist, and she came to me like a dachshund jumping into your lap.

Charles Williams / quote

10Undated

Harry,” she said, her voice a little thick with the whisky. “You found the way, didn’t you?” What’s so wonderful about it? I thought. Dogs do.

Charles Williams / quote

11Undated

There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.

Charles Williams / quote

12Undated

, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.""The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly."Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.

Charles Williams / quote

13Undated

I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there’d be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let ’em burn me. All they could do was kill me.

Charles Williams / quote

14Undated

It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.

Charles Williams / quote

15Undated

And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I'd go to prison.Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody'll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.

Charles Williams / quote

16Undated

You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.

Charles Williams / quote

17Undated

The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately. The converts had known a first coming. And then? And then! That was the trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as universal and as durable — as time.

Charles Williams / quote

18Undated

The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately, and no doubt this was so in the ordinary literal sense. But it was certainly expected also in another sense. The converts in all the cities of Asia and (soon) of Europe where the small groups were founded had known, in their conversion, one way or another, a first coming of their Redeemer. And then? And then! That was the consequent task and trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited for his further exhibition of himself. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as catholic — as universal and as durable — as time.

Charles Williams / quote

19Undated

Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.

Charles Williams / quote

20Undated

The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.

Charles Williams / quote

21Undated

It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That’s of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it’s said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.

Charles Williams / quote

22Undated

Hell is indefinite.

Charles Williams / quote

23Undated

Job plunges into a series of demands on and accusations of God which may be and indeed are epigrams of high intelligence, but are not noticeably patient.

Charles Williams / quote

24Undated

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties come prepared to forgive, neither party come prepared to be forgiven.

Charles Williams / quote