At a glance
- Age
- 64
- Born
- November 29, 1898
- From
- Belfast
- Lives in
- Belfast
- Nationality
- United Kingdom
Biography
Most readers meet him first through Narnia — the seven-book children's series that made his name — but the quotes that circulate tend to come from elsewhere in his output: the Christian apologetics, the essays, the strange satirical letters of a demon giving advice to his nephew. The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Miracles and The Problem of Pain all remain in print and in circulation, and they are the reason his lines still turn up attached to arguments about suffering, belief and self-deception.
He was born in Belfast in 1898 and spent his working life inside the English faculties of two universities whose names are almost identical. From 1925 to 1954 he taught English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford; in 1954 he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he stayed until 1963. So the fiction and the theology were written by a professional literary scholar, alongside the teaching, rather than instead of it.
His work splits into three streams that his readers rarely keep separate: the children's fantasy of The Chronicles of Narnia, the adult fiction including The Space Trilogy and Screwtape, and the non-fiction apologetics he wrote as an Anglican layman rather than as clergy. He died in November 1963, a week short of his sixty-fifth birthday.
He was born in Belfast in 1898 and spent his working life inside the English faculties of two universities whose names are almost identical. From 1925 to 1954 he taught English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford; in 1954 he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he stayed until 1963. So the fiction and the theology were written by a professional literary scholar, alongside the teaching, rather than instead of it.
His work splits into three streams that his readers rarely keep separate: the children's fantasy of The Chronicles of Narnia, the adult fiction including The Space Trilogy and Screwtape, and the non-fiction apologetics he wrote as an Anglican layman rather than as clergy. He died in November 1963, a week short of his sixty-fifth birthday.
Quotes 10
“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."”
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.”
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
