Colin Duriez > Quotes

“Tolkien had sent him a poem called “Kortirion Among the Trees”. Kortirion represented Warwick in the early stages of Tolkien’s mythology, and was the chief town, complete with tower, in a region of elms (Warwickshire) on the Lonely Island (England).”
― Colin Duriez, J.R.R. Tolkien

“It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: ‘To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.”
― Colin Duriez, The Return of the Ring Volume I: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Conference 2012

“It is… easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion… Hence if our masters… ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude.   C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves”
― Colin Duriez, The Oxford Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien and their circle

“He discovers that God is the very source of our existence. As Lewis will put it: "He is the opaque centre of all existences, the thing that simply and entirely is, the fountain of facthood.”
― Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of a Friendship: The Gift of Friendship

“education C.S. Lewis makes many references to education in his fiction. Experiment House*, for instance, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”*, embodies his dislike of modern educational methods. In his opinion Mark Studdock*, in That Hideous Strength*, is characteristic of many of Lewis’s contemporary intelligensia – uneducated by classical standards. Judged only by his satire, however, Lewis would seem intensely prejudiced. This is misleading. His powerful essay The Abolition of Man* suggested that anti-human values were being unwittingly embodied in some typical school textbooks of his time. Lewis nowhere more clearly put forward his vision of education than in his early essay “Our English Syllabus” in Rehabilitations and Other Essays*. He confesses: “Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative... Man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals… The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams… When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom…”
― Colin Duriez, The A-Z of C.S. Lewis: An encyclopaedia of his life, thought, and writings