At bottom, every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things, but what sort of things we may say.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half-aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be ever able to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
It is always the novice who exaggerates. The young man who has risen in society is overrefined; the young scholar is pedantic.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than actual exhaustion.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
theblastofatrumpet reblogged
rj-anderson-deactivated20160805
…the neat sorting-out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
C.S. Lewis (via muralofsolitude)