Quotes by Philip Zaleski

Lewis 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.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

Oxford 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 ones surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

Words 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.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

We 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.

Tolkien, 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 Faery

The arts are the best Time Machine we have. C. S. Lewis

Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.

A 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.

Words contain the souls or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewiss increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

The 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 Gods grace.

The idyll ended, as idylls must.

The 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.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

The 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.

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.