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"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality."
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."

"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."

"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Explore more quotes by C. S. Lewis

"Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."

"God's presence is not the same as the feeling of God's presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least."

"It's not a question of God `sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

"The Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning."

"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."

"Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead."

"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you...God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
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