You can reread not from love or hatred but from a sense, often inchoate, that there’s more to this book than you have ben yet able to receive.

His students were usually struck first by his appearance: he wore old tweed jackets until they fell apart, kept well into his fifties overcoats that he had inherited from Albert, and, with his ruddy complexion and hearty manner, reminded many students of a grocer or a butcher. But the voice soon captivated them. Little.

And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A.

There’s a famous and often-told story about the great economist John Maynard Keynes: once, when accused of having flip-flopped on some policy issue, Keynes acerbically replied, “When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

And he encourages Lewis to take the same chance he is taking, to count on the “perchance.” And Lewis did. For the rest of his life he was a champion of the knowledge-giving power of myth, fantasy, Faery.

By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

Robinson’s analysis. People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified – and wrathful when it is thwarted.

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.