Philip Zaleski Quotes

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

The idyll ended, as idylls must.

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

The authors disclose that in less than a century the word tension grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

~ Philip Zaleski

Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.

~ Philip Zaleski

We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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.

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski

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

~ Philip Zaleski