When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.

...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

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.

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.

It isn't against the Law to be an idiot.

Patience is the secret to good food.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui.

Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

The English people think they are free; they are greatly deceived; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament.

Words at night were feral things.

Let us protect with love all that God has given us!

I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.

If I am duly compared to Marlon Brando at all, well, I can only think of The Teahouse of the 'Shanghai Noon,' that they're comparing me to that!