If you’ve ever felt like your life was just one long argument with the universe, you're basically living in the head of Orual. C.S. Lewis wrote this book, Till We Have Faces, near the end of his life, and honestly, it’s nothing like the Narnia stuff you might remember from being a kid. It’s gritty. It’s dark. It smells like blood and old stone.
Most people come looking for till we have faces quotes because they’re wrestling with the same things Orual was: why does God (or the gods, or fate) stay so quiet when we’re screaming for answers?
Lewis isn’t interested in giving you a Hallmark card. He’s digging into the "ugly" side of love—the kind that smothers people and then calls itself a sacrifice. It’s a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, but told by the "ugly" older sister who thinks she's the hero of the story until the very last page.
The Speech We Keep Inside
There is one quote from the end of the book that usually hits people like a physical blow. Orual has spent her whole life writing a book to "sue" the gods for being cruel. She finally gets her day in court, and this is what she realizes:
"I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
Think about that for a second. We spend so much time "babbling." We say we want the truth, but we’re wearing a dozen different masks to hide who we actually are. Orual literally wore a veil for most of her life to hide her face, but the spiritual veil was even thicker.
You can't have a real conversation with someone if you're pretending to be someone else. Lewis is suggesting that the "silence of God" isn't because the Divine is ignoring us, but because we haven't even shown up as our true selves yet. We're just noise.
When Love Is Actually Devouring
One of the most uncomfortable themes in the book is how Orual loves her sister, Psyche. She thinks her love is pure. She thinks she's the only one who truly cares. But there’s a line in the book that reframes the whole thing:
“Some say that loving and the devouring are all the same thing.”
Kinda terrifying, right?
Orual’s love was a "hungry" love. She didn't want Psyche to be happy; she wanted Psyche to be hers. When Psyche finds a joy that Orual can't control or understand—specifically her marriage to the God of the Mountain—Orual tries to destroy it. She’d rather see her sister dead or miserable than happy in a way that doesn't involve her.
Later, when Orual is forced to see her soul clearly, she describes herself as a "swollen spider" at the center of a web, gorged on the lives of others. It’s a brutal image. It challenges that "in today's landscape" (oops, avoided that one) idea that all love is inherently good. Lewis shows us that love, without a bit of selflessness, is just another way to eat people alive.
The Problem With Holy Places
There’s a character called the Priest of Ungit who represents the old, "thick" religion of the land of Glome. He’s the opposite of the Fox, Orual’s Greek tutor who believes in logic and clear thinking. The Priest says something that sticks with you:
“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
A lot of us want our spirituality to be "clear and thin like water." We want logic. We want 1-2-3 steps to enlightenment. But Lewis, through the Priest, suggests that the real "holy" stuff is messy. It’s visceral. It’s something you feel in your gut, not just your head.
Orual spends the first half of the book siding with the Fox and his "clear water" logic. She thinks the gods are just a superstition. But logic can't explain why Psyche is healed, or why the mountain feels alive. Eventually, the "dark" wisdom of the temple turns out to be more "real" than the "clear" wisdom of the classroom.
Why the Gods Don't Give Us Justice
There’s a great exchange between Orual and the Fox toward the end of her journey. Orual is terrified of being judged, and the Fox tells her:
“Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.”
“Are the gods not just?”
“Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
That’s a classic Lewis move. We all think we want justice until we realize what we’ve actually done. If Orual got "justice," she’d be finished. She spent a lifetime being a "virtuous" queen while emotionally strangling everyone she loved.
What she gets instead is mercy, which is way more scandalous than justice.
The Longing for Home
Psyche, the beautiful sister, has a very different set of quotes. Her perspective is all about "Sehnsucht"—that German word Lewis loved that means a deep, inconsolable longing. She says:
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing... to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
She feels like a "bird in a cage" when she's in the palace. For her, the world isn't her home. She’s looking for the source of the light. This is why she’s able to walk toward her sacrifice on the mountain with peace, while Orual is screaming and fighting. Psyche knows she’s going "back" to where she belongs.
How to Read These Quotes Today
If you're looking at these till we have faces quotes and feeling a bit called out, that’s probably the point. Lewis wrote this for people who feel "stuck" in their own heads.
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- Audit your "babble." Next time you're complaining about life being unfair, ask yourself: am I saying what I really mean, or am I just making noise to avoid looking at my own face?
- Check your "love." Is your affection for your partner, kids, or friends about their growth, or about your need to be needed? Are you loving or devouring?
- Embrace the darkness. Stop trying to make everything "make sense" through logic alone. Sometimes the most important truths are the ones that feel "thick and dark like blood."
The final line of the book is the ultimate resolution to Orual's lifelong lawsuit. She realizes that the answer to her questions wasn't a set of words or a logical explanation. She says:
“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.”
Basically, when you finally "have a face"—when you're honest and real—the questions you thought were so important just... stop mattering. You don't need an explanation when you have the Presence.
If you want to dive deeper into this, your next step is to actually read Part 2 of the book. Most people quit after Part 1 because Orual is so frustrating, but the second part is where the "veil" actually comes off. It’s only about 50 pages long, but it changes everything you thought you knew about the first 200. Give it a shot.