Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.

Tolkien, lucky man, had protected a realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes: The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his… Wisdom made him old and wary banishing his Lords of Faery

The arts are the best Time Machine we have." C. S. Lewis

Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

The idyll ended, as idylls must.

The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

The authors disclose that in less than a century the word "tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, "The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.

Now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during "the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing," and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.

He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.

We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.

Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.

Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.

Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness".

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis

The longing for Joy is in itself Joy. When he recalled when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unattainable – at least in our earthly existence.

J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God.

Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

Christian myth, reveals the truth that "the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world.

Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.

Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.

Shame and suffering, as St. Bernard says, are the two ladder-uprights which are set up to heaven, and between those two uprights are the rungs of all virtues fixed, by which one climbs to the joy of heaven… In these two things, in which is all penance, rejoice and be glad, for in return for these, twofold blisses are prepared: in return for shame honour; in return for suffering, delight and rest without end.

A Christian's duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate "X" but to make life with "X" an occasion to work on one's own character flaws.

It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.

The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

Lewis spoke for almost every member when he said, "There is no sound I like better than adult male laughter.

A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.

C.S. Lewis had come to demand of his nightly prayers a "realization," "a certain vividness of the imagination and the affectations" – a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery.

The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.

He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.

Charles Williams loved his son with reservations, complaining that "a child is a guest of a somewhat inconsistent temperament, rather difficult to get rid of, almost pushing; a poor relation rather than a pleasant kind.

Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.