Surprised By Joy

I've been thinking recently that I really should read some C.S.Lewis other than just the Narnia books. So I've started with his autobiography,  Surprised by Joy,  and so far it's fascinating. 

His description of all the books in his house when growing up:

My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field of finding a new blade of grass.

Writing versus paper craft:

I had now learned both to read and write; I had a dozen things to do...What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered....It was this that forced me to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines...I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that  ever stood on a nursery table.

On joy:

An unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply  distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.

On the illness and death of his mother:

I set myself to produce by willpower a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful...The thing hadn't worked, but I was used to things not working...I think the truth is that  the belief into which I had hypnotised myself was itself too irreligious for its failure to cause any religious revolution. I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Saviour nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was required of Him I suppose He would simply- well, go away.

On friendship:

While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.

On home and school:

The sensations which every boy had on passing from the warmth and softness and dignity of his home life to the privations, the raw and sordid ugliness of school. I say 'had' not 'has'; for perhaps homes have gone down in the world and schools have gone up since then.

On reading:

Soon too we gave up magazines; we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights. (It is important to acquire early in life the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be.)