16 quotes found
“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.”
“because we all know that the books weve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly”
“because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly”
“The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.”
“Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.”
“If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.”
“Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of th...”
“If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You mi...”
“A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to...”
“Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?”
“Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of tell...”
“There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewiss further suggestion that if we can find even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had be...”
“I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish...”
“I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults librarians, friends parents suggest to me that I liked books with magic because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the...”
“There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had ...”
“I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacke...”