Quotes from Philip Zaleski

Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.

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.

Oxford was in love with the idea of Christian perfection.

The idyll ended, as idylls must.

Tolkien regretted the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm, and called for research motivated by love of knowledge rather than hunger for a job.

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.

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

The arts are the best Time Machine we have. C. S. Lewis

Shame and suffering, as St. Bernard says, are the two ladder-uprights which are set up to heaven, and between those two uprights are the rungs of all virtues fixed, by which one climbs to the joy of heaven… In these two things, in which is all penance, rejoice and be glad, for in return for these, twofold blisses are prepared: in return for shame honour; in return for suffering, delight and rest without end.

Christian myth, reveals the truth that the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world.

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.

This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.

Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

The church marched into his heart. Williams never abandon Anglicanism; he pushed at its borders.

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.

She was simpler, less fractured by life during her youth.

Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

The artist became a subcreator.

C.S. Lewis had come to demand of his nightly prayers a realization, a certain vividness of the imagination and the affectations – a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery.

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.

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

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.