“That is the question I get all the time. What I did when crafting this tale, Miss Devonshire, was to suppose that there was another world, and God entered it in a different way than He did here on earth. And so there you have Aslan. It’s a supposal, if you will.”

“Yes. Balder. Adonis. Bacchus.” He named just a few gods from his favorite pagan myths. “And of course, Jesus Christ.”

was a charming hidden route, and we passed under an arched stone overhang connecting wall to wall, ivy growing wild and giving me a feeling of the world being made of nothing but stone and vines and hidden crannies. The narrow Cuckoo Lane connected Headington to Old Headington and seemed meant for only a secret few; now I was one of them.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’”

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

“We don’t speak our opinions unless logic backs them up. What did you know of the Surrey countryside before you arrived, and what did you expect? Have you been educated in the flora and geography of Surrey to base your opinion on something other than what you expected?”

Sir Peter Mouse, Gollywog, and others with strange names. On a sheet of lined paper, in his funny half-capital-letter, half-cursive handwriting, Jack listed all of them under the title Dramatis Personae.

‘Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.’”

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