Philip Zaleski

J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God.

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis

The longing for Joy is in itself Joy. When he recalled when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unattainable _ at least in our earthly existence.

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis

Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness".

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

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

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

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

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

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

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.

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.

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

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

He trusted the cosmos _ but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.