“The way stories change us can’t be explained,” Padraig says. “It can only be felt. Like love.”

“These stories make us remember something we forgot. They make a young boy want to hop out of a bed and see the ruins of a castle. These kinds of stories wake us up.”

“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty. You can take what hurts and aches and perform magic with it so it becomes something else, something that never would have been, except you make it so with your spells and stories and with your life.”

These things begin to turn into a catalog of facts. I am scribbling as though the world is held together by these very notes, as if the planets spin according to the correct order of all that could have contributed to the universe that is Narnia. As if I can unravel the beginnings of this world the way Einstein tries to unravel the beginning of our

“Megs, sometimes a man changes his mind when he sees the truth of things. I ask you to have a little confidence in my sincerity.”

“Megs, every human interaction is eternally important.”

Is it that each one represents a universal pattern of human nature?

continue to hear this idea, that I have set out to write a Christian allegory, but it is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Like I said, everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of

“We rearrange elements that God has provided. Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.”