01UndatedLewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
02UndatedA letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
03UndatedOxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
04UndatedIn the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen BarfieldPhilip Zaleski / quote ↗
05UndatedWords are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
06UndatedImagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
07UndatedWe must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
08UndatedTolkien, lucky man, had protected a realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes: The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his… Wisdom made him old and wary banishing his Lords of FaeryPhilip Zaleski / quote ↗
10UndatedNow he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
11UndatedA very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
12UndatedWords contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
14UndatedAs is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
15UndatedThe unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
17UndatedThe onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
19UndatedThe authors disclose that in less than a century the word "tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, "The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
21UndatedNow a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during "the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing," and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
22UndatedHe trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
23UndatedHe called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.Philip Zaleski / quote ↗
