On Stories Quotes

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales 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.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a net whereby to catch something else.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“No story can be devised by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted allegorically by the wit of some other man.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“the ‘story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“If you have a religion it must be cosmic.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“And when, however reverently, you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“This extraordinary pride in being exempt from temptations that you have not yet risen to the level of! Eunuchs boasting of their chastity!”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most pre-occupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child psychology and decided what age-group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. 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 its own accord.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“A skilful doctor of words will pronounce the disease to be mortal at that moment when the word in question begins to harbour the adjectival parasites real or true. As long as gentleman has a clear meaning, it is enough to say that So-and-So is a gentleman. When we begin saying that he is a ‘real gentleman’ or ‘a true gentleman’ or ‘a gentleman in the truest sense’ we may be sure that the word has not long to live.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“What I feel far more sure of is the critical caveat which I propounded a while ago. Do not criticise what you have no taste for without great caution. And, above all, do not ever criticise what you simply can’t stand.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Perhaps the scene in the original was not ‘cinematic’ and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. 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.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“A leap into the future, a rapid assumption of all the changes which are feigned to have occurred, is a legitimate 'machine' if it enables the author to develop a story of real value which could not have been told (or not so economically) in any other way.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“In this sub-species [of science fiction] the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love-story, spy-story, wreck-story, or crime-story. This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used is doing harm. The faintly imagined, and sometimes strictly unimagineable, scene and properties, only blur the real theme and distract us from any interest it might have had.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“Esta é uma das funções da arte: apresentar o que as perspectivas estreitas e desesperadamente práticas da vida real excluem.”
― C.S. Lewis, Sobre Histórias (Clássicos C.S. Lewis)

“The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain ideal surprisingness. The point has often been misunderstood.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven [grades in school]. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?—really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all the real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself….”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature