More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
C.S. Lewis
Read between
September 18 - October 23, 2020
WE SEEK AN ENLARGEMENT OF OUR BEING. WE want to be more than ourselves.
We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.
1. Loves to re-read books.
Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty
or thirty times during the course of their life.
2. Highly values reading as an activity (versus a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.
3. Lists the reading of particular books as a life-changing experience.
comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
ABOUT ONCE EVERY HUNDRED YEARS SOME WISEACRE gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale.
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 mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.
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—except, of course, books of information.
Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them.
For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined.
Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.
