A poor reader can’t dance to the prose. But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.

The story is the way the story is told.

writers who want their story to be understood not only by their contemporary compatriots but also by people of other lands and times, may seek a way of telling it that is more universally comprehensible; and fantasy is such a way.

Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don’t have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults.

The story is the way the story is told.

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

“mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.

Anybody who has been privileged to know real, solid, nonfuzzy happiness, and then lets some novelist or critic buffalo them into believing that they shouldn’t read about it because it’s commoner than unhappiness, inferior to unhappiness, less interesting than unhappiness,—where does my syntax lead me? Into judgmentalism. I shall extricate myself in

by letting Eve and Adam cast themselves out of Eden without any help at all from him, and really none from the serpent either—to put sin and salvation, love and death in our own hands, as our own, strictly human business, our responsibility—now