Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’”

‘Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.’”

“The fantastic and the imaginative aren’t escapism.” “How so?” This seems important. “Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning.”

“I think he wants us to figure it out ourselves. Like a puzzle,” I say. “That’s the best I can guess.” “I don’t know.” George stares past me, over my shoulder to the window. “I think he’s trying to show us that there is no figuring it out.”

all fairy tales have a bad part. They all have a scary part.

Because even with the dark parts and the light parts and the good parts and the bad parts, dinner must still be served.

George takes something of this world and travels to another, as if the story world and the real world run right alongside each other. Or maybe they are inside each other.

For a breath or two, I wonder about this magical world we live in. It’s a mystery we can never understand. For a moment, a small and breath-holding moment, I know it to be true: there is more, something more I can’t see, a vivid truth that can’t be described by logic or words alone, a truth that delights the heart. And then my feeling—or was it a knowing?—is gone.

He abandoned the poem, ripping it to shreds and feeling, for the first time, he knew what writing actually meant. It wasn’t just words, one after the other.

a poet friend named Charles Williams who once wrote a line that says, ‘the sky turned round,’ and that’s how it felt for him when he found Wagner’s opera, as if the sky had turned round.”

When I solve a problem or equation that seems impossible, it’s like there’s some kind of light

“Like when you finish a story and you wish you could read it like you’d never read it before. Like you want to read it for the first time again,”

You have taught me that talking and writing aren’t merely for chatter. They are, above all, a means to discovering the truth.” “I hear you,” the Knock said. “I hear you.”

What if I read a book that made me fall in love so hard and so fast that I would search for more of its kind?

“Every mythology in the world has a beginning story,” says Padraig. “They call it an origin story. Every culture has a legend about where we began. But no one—not in science or story or myth—can really say where stories start.”

You must be very careful about what you choose to read—unless you want to stay stuck in your opinions and hard-boiled thoughts, you must be very careful.”

all books worth loving were worth rereading over and over.

“You, my friend, believe in the importance of myth, as do Hugo and I.” Jack tapped his walking stick on the soft earth as a young couple floated by on an evening punt ride. “Believing in its importance and believing its facts are not the same. Myth conveys power. Myth gives import to the story. Myth guides us. Myths strike and strike deep. Myths have deep power over our human psyche. But that is not the same as being factually true. We all know that. We’ve all studied the Norse myths and the Celts and the Bible.”

“Myths show us the way the world should be, or could be, instead of how it is,” Tollers said, stopping to watch a squirrel scamper up the tree and disappear in the higher branches. “That is why we want more and more of them.”

Something within him had shifted. “Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”

you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they write their books. When the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like.”

Devonshire, was to suppose that there was another world, and God entered it in a different way than He did here on earth. And so there you have Aslan.

don’t we all know the White Witch? Must she be someone in particular? We can try and find the source, but we are all born knowing the Witch, aren’t we?” “Yes. We are.” I think about the disease that has ravaged my brother’s heart, making it weak. His illness is the White Witch. War is the White Witch. Cruelty is the White Witch.

Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.”

continue to hear this idea, that I have set out to write a Christian allegory, but it is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Like I said, everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. And archetypes,”

My absolutely stunning realization that stories are a kind of answer, the same as any physics equation, will take me some time to fully absorb.