Creativity Quote by Ruth Pitter

There is a disarming intensity to the promise: “any honest thing under the sun.” Pitter isn’t angling for proximity through flattery or social climbing; she’s drawing a bright moral boundary around her desire. The word “honest” does double duty. It reassures the recipient that her eagerness won’t curdle into manipulation, and it quietly acknowledges the temptation to do otherwise when the prize is a mind like C. S. Lewis’s. Admiration, she implies, can make people slippery. She refuses that.

The line also catches a particular mid-century British texture: the slow electricity of literary friendship before email and fandom economies. To “know” Lewis isn’t to consume his work or collect a signature; it’s relational, almost vocational. Pitter frames acquaintance as something earned through character rather than access. That’s why the gratitude lands so cleanly: “and so am very grateful to you.” No performative gush, just a simple ethical logic - if you’ve helped me pursue a good desire in a good way, you’ve done me a real kindness.

Subtextually, she’s also staging her own seriousness. Pitter was a poet and a Christian writer moving in overlapping circles with Lewis; the statement reads like a letter to a gatekeeper or mutual friend, signaling both reverence and self-possession. She wants Lewis, but she won’t debase herself to get him. The sentence works because it makes longing sound principled - an ambition disciplined by conscience, which is precisely the kind of currency Lewis’s world respected.