They taught us to believe in dragons

"And a few encounters with living legends didn't hurt: I studied at the University of Oxford, and the English syllabus stopped at 1832, because there were two gentlemen named Tolkien and C.S. Lewis who had resisted taking it any further — they were both teaching there and we went to their lectures. So we encountered, thanks to those two, things like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and above all, Shakespeare. A friend of mine once said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.'" - The Lost Land of Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper is an award-winning writer of young adult and fantasy fiction, including the The Dark is Rising sequence. She also co-wrote the play Foxfire.