Out of the Silent Planet (Space Trilogy, #1)

by C.S. Lewis

he was a philologist, and fellow of a Cambridge college.

JR Tolkien, Lewis's friend and author of LORD OF THE RINGS, was also a philologist and colleague at Cambridge.

A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him.

What a poignantly accurate observation of Western culture post the Enlightenment.

He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void.

you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

curiosity held him.

ineluctable fascination of unlike for unlike,

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmn, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

it was obvious that unlimited breeding and promiscuity were as rare as the rarest perversions.

And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back

How can I make you understand, when you do not understand the poets?

Yeah, I don't understand poets, either.

Ransom knew a little psychology and had heard of the hunted man’s irrational instinct to give himself up

I have never heard of this.

To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.

sorrows eternally consoled,

The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.”