Essays Presented to Charles Williams

". . . nearly always on Thursday evenings in my rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the best of all public-houses for draught cider, whose name it would be madness to reveal."
-C.S. Lewis, preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, viii-ix

"He was ready to accept as a revealed doctrine the proposition that existence is good: but added that it would never have occurred to him, unaided, to suspect this. . . It is one of the many paradoxes in Williams that while no man's conversation was less gloomy in tone--it was, indeed, a continual flow of gaiety, enthusiasm, and high spirits--no man at times said darker things. . . . But that was only one side of him. This scepticism and pessimism were the expression of his feelings. High above them, overarching them like a sky, were the things he believed, and they were wholly optimistic. They did not negate his feelings: they mocked them."
-Lewis, preface, xii-xiii

"No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed."
-Lewis, preface, xiv

"Creative fantasy . . . may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like caged birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you."
-J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" from Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 75