“because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly”

“When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.Laura Miller - Butterfly Weeds”

“Litchat, however, is singleminded. Seemingly, it can only conceive of a writer’s persona as one thing at a time: a prick, a detached brainiac, a suffering saint. Litchat is adamant, yes, and impervious to factual challenges, but that tends to be true of all strong opinions formed on a basis of incomplete and selective evidence. The weaker our footing, the more fiercely we defend it. We believe it not because it fits what we know—we know next to nothing, after all—but because we need to believe this particular thing at this particular time, regardless of what the truth may be. It suits our purposes to do so, and one of those purposes may be as flimsy as the desire to be excused from reading the books in question before telling the world what we think of them.”

“She tries to wear her pain on the inside. She always has. It’s the trademark of the oldest sibling, I think.”

“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.”

“because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly”

“Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.”

“The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.”

“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, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked.”

“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.”

“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 thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.”