Quotes from Philip Zaleski

It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.

He had found his vocation: to fight the Lord's battles in the Academy and the world at large.

Like other intellectuals, he welcomed the mindless drudgery as a refreshing change of pace.

Facts seemed to run around and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Even while an atheist, he held some things sacred.

After reading binge prompted by convalescence, As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace.

He was a trifle embarrassed to be deserting his hard-won realism in order to follow what he thought was the dominant philosophical fashion.

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.

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.

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

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

They shared much with Bloomsbury, including love of beauty, companionship, and conversation, but they differed from their older London counterpart in their religious ardor, their social conservatism, and their embrace of fantasy, myth, and (mostly) conventional literary techniques instead of those dazzling experiments with time, character, narrative, and language that mark the modernist aesthetic.

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.

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

Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.

Resignation is the better part of wisdom.

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

Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.