“You ask me whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as all that. But if one is only to talk from firsthand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sapho, of Euripides of Catullus of Shakespeare of Spenser of Austen of Bronte of – anyone else I have read.”

Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 146; writing to friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 12 October, 1915.