Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
55 quotes
"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."
"Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind."
"Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness."
"Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world."
"Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness"."
"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, Lewis's 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 God's 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."
"He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him."
"Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly."
"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."
"Charles Williams loved his son with reservations, complaining that "a child is a guest of a somewhat inconsistent temperament, rather difficult to get rid of, almost pushing; a poor relation rather than a pleasant kind."
"Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted."