Quotes from Philip Zaleski

Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.

Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.

A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.

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

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 teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.

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

Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.

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.

He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.

A Christian's duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate "X" but to make life with "X" an occasion to work on one's own character flaws.

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

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

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.

their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Language construction will BREED a mythology. J.R.R. Tolkien