The Narnian Quotes

“Those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without self-forgetfulness there can be no delight, and this is a great and grievous loss.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“For Lewis, Christian unity begins with the recognition that we have all, like Eustace, through our pride and selfishness, made ourselves into dragons. We must then understand that we cannot undragon ourselves—we lack the strength—and after that we must accept that God is ready and willing to undragon us, if we will but allow Him do to so. For Lewis, only those who share this picture of the human predicament and its cure can join together in true unity—can really, and not just nominally, become members of one another in a single Body.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“Objections to Christianity... are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to "preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary." It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in the defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“In most children but in relatively few adults, at least in our time, we may see this willingness to be delighted to the point of self-abandonment. This free and full gift of oneself to a story is what produces the state of enchantment. But why do we lose the desire—or if not the desire, the ability—to give ourselves in this way?”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“What is “secretly present in what he said about anything” is an openness to delight, to the sense that there’s more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“And he encourages Lewis to take the same chance he is taking, to count on the "perchance." And Lewis did. For the rest of his life he was a champion of the knowledge-giving power of myth, fantasy, Faery.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“His students were usually struck first by his appearance: he wore old tweed jackets until they fell apart, kept well into his fifties overcoats that he had inherited from Albert, and, with his ruddy complexion and hearty manner, reminded many students of a grocer or a butcher. But the voice soon captivated them. Little”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“Lewis was an exceptionally skillful exposer of ideological forces and their titanic influence over us, but he rarely gets credit for this from contemporary intellectuals because it is their most treasured beliefs that, more often than not, he is exposing. So instead of praising him for the acuity of his insights, they call him “reactionary” or “Victorian”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“...Lewis's mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted and that it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life---his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story, whether written by an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, by Beatrix Potter, or by himself.......an openness to delight, to the sense that there's more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“Lewis passionately believed that education is not about providing information so much as cultivating “habits of the heart”—producing “men with chests,” as he puts it in his book The Abolition of Man, that is, people who not only think as they should but respond as they should, instinctively and emotionally, to the challenges and blessings the world offers to them.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“It turns out that it is a lot easier to keep believing what everyone around us believes if we ignore or misrepresent the beliefs of our ancestors.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

“I gave up Christianity at about fourteen. Came back to it when getting on for thirty. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn’t want to. I’m not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master: but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis