The Magician's Book Quotes

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with...”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“This is one of the chief differences between a child's experience of a favorite book and an educated adult's. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: “it admits us to experiences other than our own.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“there’s a difference between wanting all stories you read to be about you in the most literal sense, and reading with the hope that you can find a bit of yourself in all stories, however alien they may seem on the surface. When our capacity to identify withers, so does a portion of our humanity.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession... but about securing a portal.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults — librarians, friends’ parents — suggest to me that I liked books “with magic” because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for.”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia