I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C. S. LewisA work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal.
C. S. LewisBe sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place โ to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.
C. S. LewisThe value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by โthe veil of familiarity.โ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a storyโฆby putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.
C. S. Lewis