Philip Zaleski

“He 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.”

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

“Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.”

“Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.”

“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 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.”

“As 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.”

“Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.”

“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”

“We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis”

“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.”

“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.”

“Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.”

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

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

“The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.”

“Now 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.”

“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.”

“The idyll ended, as idylls must.”