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Book: C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
Quotes of Book: C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric
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  1. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    As Lewis later put it, "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
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  2. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio {1221–1274} describes as the "journey of the mind to God.
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  3. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    village." The scholar, Lewis declares, has "lived in many times" and can thus challenge the automatic presumption of finality inherent in present judgements and trends: We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.58
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  4. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    Literature-above all, poetry-was Lewis's firewall, keeping the chaotic and meaningless external world at a safe distance, and shielding him from the existential devastation it wreaked on others.
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  5. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago."{
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  6. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    Lewis had discovered the calming and coping impact, not merely of reading literature, but of putting his feelings into his own words. It was as if the mental process of forging sentences tempered and tamed the emotions that originally inspired them."
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  7. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    For Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something that lies beyond their grasp. Myths
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  8. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    Yet Lewis quickly realised that he was being forced to develop his critical thinking, based on evidence and reason rather than his personal intuitions.
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  9. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    Sehnsucht? The German word is rich with emotional and imaginative associations, famously described by the poet Matthew Arnold as a "wistful, soft, tearful longing." And what of the "Blue Flower"? Leading German Romantic writers, such as Novalis {1772–1801} and Joseph von Eichendorff {1788–1857}, used the image of a "Blue Flower" as a symbol of the wanderings and yearnings of the human soul, especially as this sense of longing is evoked-though not satisfied-by the natural world.
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  10. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    They taught me longing-Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.
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  11. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the "big picture" and discern the "grand story" of all things, so that the snapshots and stories of his own life could assume a deeper meaning.
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  12. Alister E. McGrath _ C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric

    In 1962, Francine Smithline-a schoolgirl from New York-wrote to C. S. Lewis, telling him how much she had enjoyed his Narnia books and asking him for information about his own schooldays. In reply, Lewis informed her that he had attended three boarding schools, "of which two were very horrid."42 In fact, Lewis continues, he "never hated anything as much, not even the front line trenches in World War I.
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