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The Lewis Legacy-Issue 78, Autumn 1998 Notes and Quotes

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 78, Autumn 1998 The C.S. Lewis Foundation for Truth in Publishing

“He has not the talent of saying what he has to say quickly; nor is he aware that brevity is in writing what charity is to all other virtues. Righteousness is worth nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.”

Sydney Smith (1771-1845)

“Your letter finds me in the midst of exams and a complete reply is impossible now. If you are losing your faith in reason, why did you use all those reasons to tell me so?”

C. S. Lewis, in a two-sentence letter to Corbin Scott Carnell in 1953

“Douglas Gresham. Lewis’ stepson, is eager to redeem his mother’s image. ‘She was not above telling nosy friends that she was going to England to seduce C. S. Lewis.’ he said, but added that there was nothing reprehensible about a woman falling in love with a man and setting out to attract his love to her.”

The Observer, 20 September 1998

“Adults should not disdain children’s books: they can be fine sources for brief introductions on a topic. Unfortunately, none of the children’s biographies of Lewis can be recommended with any enthusiasm: they are all unbalanced or inaccurate. The most easily available currently, The Man Who Created Narnia by Michael Coren (Eerdmans, hardcover), is riddled with factual errors, in particular distorting the story of Lewis’s changing religious beliefs.”

David Bratman

“The Dark Tower is the least literary of all Lewis’s fictions. Certainly it is the farthest from allegory and even from paraphrasable meaning. Consciously or unconsciously it approaches an area of mysteriously strong negative feelings and conflicts, untouched elsewhere in his work.”

Alastair Fowler. Times Literary Supplement (1 July 1977)

“This is not a book that should be thrown away lightly. It should be thrown away with great force.”

Dorothy Parker, 16th Annual C. S. Lewis Lecture, University of Tennessee, Chatanooga, TN