C.S. Lewis

"Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation bywhich a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. - Screwtape"

"If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

"We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely."

"You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that."

"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books."

"Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old."

"It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests."

"Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us."

"Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves."

"When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them."

"We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

"When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things."

"A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation."

"In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life."