“Be comforted, small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come. Though men or angels rule them, the worlds are for themselves. The waters you have not floated on, the fruit you have not plucked, the caves into which your bodies cannot pass, do not await your coming to put on perfection, though they will obey you when you come. Times without number I have circled Arbol while you were not alive, and those times were not desert. Their own voice was in them, not merely a dreaming of the day when you should awake. They also were at the centre.”
— C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)