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“‘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.’”
“Megs . . .” He exhales and snuggles closer. “All stories have the dark and scary part,” he says. “Maybe that’s where we are now. The dark part before the good part.” “Well,” she says, “maybe this
“God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want,” she told her sons. “There are things we can’t know about His great plan.”
“Stories have their own truth.”
“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.” “Yes,” Warnie says. “It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”
‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’”
He once said to me that he’d never wanted to grow up because his father made it look so dreary. Adulthood frightened him, but then there it was—thrust upon him.”
I don’t know the right answer to anything these days.” “Neither do I, Mum. I don’t know if anyone does. Only math problems seem to have right and wrong answers, far as I can tell lately.”
“Thank you for everything, sir. You have taught me so very much. My gratitude to you and Mrs. Kirkpatrick is great. 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?
That’s when it happens, as it has never happened to me before when reading a story: time falls away as if it doesn’t exist at all, as if the cosmos holds still while I read. As if it waits for me to read this story.
mean?” “It’s all a mystery, Megs. The stories and where they come from. Physics and how the universe works. We’re privileged to try to figure it out, whether it’s a story or a math equation.”
“After a book is written, it is hard to know where it came from. Can anyone—can you—say exactly how things are made up? How one of your physicists comes up with a new theory? How imagination rises up to make meaning? When you have an idea, can you tell George or your friend exactly how you thought of it? Its genesis is very mysterious.” “I can’t, no. Sometimes I think things and I don’t even know why I’m thinking them. Like the thoughts are thinking
“Every life should be guided and enriched by one book or another, don’t you agree? Certainly, every formative moment in my life has been enriched or informed by a book. 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.”
because by now he understood that all books worth loving were worth rereading over and over.
In that moment, life made no sense. There was no plan or rhyme or reason, no goodness or mercy or great love.
The room smells of tobacco smoke and sunshine, if sunshine has an aroma.
“A myth tells a truth without the facts. You do not have to believe it is true to see the truth.
“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”
Miss 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. It’s a supposal, if you will.” “A supposal. What’s that?” “Something supposed, an idea of another world. And if there was this other world, how would God show Himself?”
“We rearrange elements that God has provided. 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.”
“Do you know Psalm 19?” he asks. I think for a breath and then another, moving myself backward through my memory to catechism days. “The one about the heavens or the sky showing God’s handiwork?” “Yes. The cosmos reveals God’s handiwork.” “So you’re saying maybe stories are the same? That they reveal . . . God’s handiwork?” I think for a better word. “Or truth? They reveal some kind of truth about the universe? That’s what physics is all about.” “Yes, that is partly what I am saying. Megs, stars are made of dust and nitrogen; they are balls of gas and hydrogen. But that isn’t what a star is;
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Meaning and knowledge cannot be measured or calculated like this!
“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty. You can take what hurts and aches and perform magic with it so it becomes something else, something that never would have been, except you make it so with your spells and stories and with your life.”
These kinds of stories wake us up.”
“The way stories change us can’t be explained,” Padraig says. “It can only be felt. Like love.”
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.
“I think the lion follows all of us around. We just have to look for him.”
Some babies are born closer to the end of their story than others, and this little boy was one of those.
Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.
“There is a light, a bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”
The stories that thrilled him were echoes of the world that waited for him. And he heard, as loud as a new world thundering out of the cosmos, the mighty roar of a lion.
