C. S. Lewis
British writer
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening — any evening — would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
—C. S. Lewis, British writer, A Confession (re: T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), 1964
Posted on July 31, 2000 at 11:55 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no function at all but to express or stimulate emotion, or both. And an examination of them soon convinces us that in them we see language at its least linguistic. We have come to the frontier between language and inarticulate vocal sounds.
—C. S. Lewis, British writer, Studies In Words, 1960
Posted on October 29, 1999 at 3:36 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
—C. S. Lewis, British writer, Studies In Words, 1960
Posted on November 10, 2000 at 7:11 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
One of the most important and effective uses of language is the emotional. It is also, of course, wholly legitimate. We do not talk only in order to reason or to inform. We have to make love and quarrel, to propitiate and pardon, to rebuke, console, intercede, and arouse. "He that complains," said Johnson, "acts like a man, like a social being."
—C. S. Lewis, British writer, Studies In Words, 1960
Posted on September 29, 2000 at 5:07 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It is easier to describe the threshold of divine revelation then the working of a pair of scissors.
—C. S. Lewis, British writer, Studies in Words, 1960
Posted on May 19, 1999 at 6:35 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
—C. S. Lewis, British writer
Posted on October 9, 2002 at 8:41 AM
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