The best trilogy of all time!?
LoR? BTTF? Batman [Begins, TDK, TDKR]? Toy Story? The Godfather? Bourne? Austin Powers?
The answer is… CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy.
Perhaps some of you will disagree with this, but hear me out. The least you can do is read Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, & That Hideous Strength 4 times each and then let me know what you think.
Here are some quotations from each book to whet your appetite 🙂
“You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“Weston did not know the Malacandrian word for laugh: indeed, it was not a word he understood very well in any language.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were the subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“Ransom was by now thoroughly frightened—not with the prosaic fright that a man suffers in a war, but with a heady, bounding kind of fear that was hardly distinguishable from his general excitement: he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt, he might at any moment pass either into delirious terror or into an ecstasy of joy.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“There I drank life because death was in the pool. That was the best of drinks save one.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“What one?” Asked Ransom
“Death itself in the day I drink it and go to Maleldil.”
“The hrossa used to have many books of poetry,” they added. “But now they have fewer. They say that the writing of books destroys poetry.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“The Bent One would have made them as your people are now- wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human history—of war, slavery and prostitution. “It is because they have no Oyarsa,” said one of the pupils. “It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,” said Augray.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“In that way you are seeing a picture that was finished when your world was still half-made. But do not speak of these things. My people have a law never to speak much of sizes or numbers to you others, not even to sorns. You do not understand, and it makes you do reverence to nothings and pass by what is truly great.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our sue, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern…
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“You had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was — gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity – like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parcel of that unhappy distinction between soul and body which resulted from the fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“He is indeed but breathing dust and a careless touch would unmake him. And in his best thoughts there are such things mingled as, if we thought them, our light would perish. But he is in the body of Maleldil and his sins are forgiven.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“The fatal false step which, once taken, would thrust her down into the terrible slavery of appetite and hate and economics and government which our race knows so well.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“Then he smiled in spite of himself at the very undistinguished career he was having on Perelandra. For dangers he had been prepared; but to be first a disappointment and then an absurdity…”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“And now it came. It was fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light: it was Charity, not as mortals imagine it, not even as it has been humanised for them since the Incarnation of the Word, but the translunary virtue, fallen upon them direct from the Third Heaven, unmitigated. They were blinded, scorched, defeaned. They thought it would burn their bones. They could not bear that it should continue. They could not bear that it should cease.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“It is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak a stimulant.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“Child,” said the Director, “it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“Yes,” said the Director. “There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, he would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing—the gold lion, the bearded bull—which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“He wondered vaguely why he was like that. How did other people—people like Denniston or Dimble—find it so easy to saunter through the world with all their muscles relaxed and a careless eye roving the horizon, bubbling over with fancy and humor, sensitive to beauty, not continually on their guard and not needing to be? What was the secret of that fine, easy laughter which he could not by any efforts imitate? Everything about them was different. They could not even fling themselves into chairs without suggesting by the very posture of their limbs a certain lordliness, a leo-nine indolence. There was elbow room in their lives, as there had never been in his. They were Hearts: he was only a Spade. Still, he must be getting on. . .”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“And it’s not very easy to refute him. He is our skeptic; a very important office.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
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