“No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines--ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives...”

“Although now long estranged,Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Lightthrough whom is splintered from a single Whiteto many hues, and endlessly combinedin living shapes that move from mind to mind.Though all the crannies of the world we filledwith Elves and Goblins, though we dared to buildGods and their houses out of dark and light,and sowed the seed of dragons- 'twas our right(used or misused). That right has not decayed:we make still by the law in which we're made.Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

“It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so -- and all the more -- what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is -- blind or not -- a good world to live in, a promising universe.”

“The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.”

“We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. ”

“No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.”