Do you ever encounter a line or a passage in a book that makes you shiver with delight, one that bends your mind, or (if you’re a writer) one that makes you so envious you could scream?  In all my years of reading, I have encountered some lines that just take my breath away every time I read them.  This week, I’m going to share them with you.

Today’s lines come from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.

“As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else – something he vaguely called the “Normal” – apparently existed…. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal.”

Mmm … all those k-sounds!  Rooks cawing at Cure Hardy.  LOVE.

How about this:

“great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth”

That sounded like castles.  I’m in love.

Jack Lewis, you are my hero.