Home > Work > The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
1 " 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 , The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
2 " A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian. "
3 " 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. "
4 " In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield "
5 " 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. "
6 " Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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 "
9 " Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love. "
10 " 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. "
11 " Passion does not translate easily into good income. "
12 " 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. "
13 " 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. "
14 " The idyll ended, as idylls must. "
15 " 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. "
16 " A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures. "
17 " Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly. "
18 " He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth. "
19 " 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. "
20 " As the honors accrued, creativity diminished. "
