Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
10 quotes
"Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?"
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly"
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
"Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects."
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia