The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 t...

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.

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, app...

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

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...

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 w...

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia