Quotes from Diana Pavlac Glyer

At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both." Within

I was hideously shocked. Everything that I had laboured so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends but those whom I would have thought safest; the one so immovable, the other brought up in a free-thinking family and so immune from all "superstition" that he had hardly heard of Christianity itself until he went to school. Though

Tolkien imagined The Lord of the Rings as a book very much like The Hobbit: aimed at a young audience, built around humor and pranks, and modeled on the structure of a folktale or fairy story. He even called it "the Hobbit sequel" or "the new Hobbit." He

The assault, it seemed, was relentless. Tongue in cheek, he writes, "Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side." The

As Tolkien points out, the name is "a pleasantly ingenious pun," referring to those who "dabble in ink." It also suggests people "with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas.

Do not all the achievements of a poet's predecessors and contemporaries rightfully belong to him? Why should he shrink from picking flowers where he finds them? Only by making the riches of the others our own do we bring anything great into being.

For Lewis, praise is not only a natural part of life, but also one of the most important traits of a healthy mind. He observes, "The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least." He sums it up this way: "Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.

Opposition is true friendship." Something