These are beginnings of what will hopefully will someday be a copious supply of quotes on as many topics as possible.
The quotes are, for the present at least, organized alphabetically by topic.
If you have a quote that you think should be listed here, email it to me, and please, if at all possible, please include the source (and page number, if applicable).
On Advertising:
On agape love:
On Art:
On Art and its role:
On Articulating thoughts:
On artists:
On artists and their desires:
On assurance:
On "being time" :
On book discussion groups:
On "the butterfly effect" :
On Certainty :
On Change :
On Change :
On Change :
On Characters :
On Charles Wallace and others :
On Children's Literature:
On coincidence:
On Community:
On completeness :
On comprehending God:
On concentration:
On contradiction :
On the church:
On church attendance:
On communication:
On creation versus evolution:
On darkness :
On death :
On death :
On definitions:
On disaster :
On Diversity:
On taking of the Eucharist:
On evangelism:
On explicability:
On False Expectations:
On Families and Sacrifice:
On feminism:
On forever:
On forgiving oneself:
On Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline :
On Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World :
On God:
On God's attention to detail:
On God's Love:
On healing :
On 'helping the world':
On the Holy Spirit:
On human failure:
On human-ness:
On Idols:
On Insecurity:
On Intellectuals:
On Intimacy:
On Irrationality:
On Jesus:
On Jesus after his resurrection:
On Joy:
On kything:
On language:
On legalism:
On life-after-death:
On looking for good:
On Love and easiness:
On Love and Life:
On Love and meaning:
On George Macdonald :
On magic and miracles :
On making a statement:
On Mary Magdalene :
On marriage:
On marriage:
On mathematics:
On Maturity:
On Lucy Maud Montgomery:
On motherly love:
On Music and Creation:
On naming :
On Neo-physics:
On Non-Euclidean geometry :
On oneness and time:
On Henri J.M. Nouwen's Way of the Heart :
On ownership:
On pain:
On paradox :
On parties:
On Peacemaking:
On play:
On Politeness:
On the power of prayer :
On prayer :
On prayer :
On prayer :
On Pride:
On Our Purpose:
On "Real People":
On the reconciliation of God :
On Religious Fanaticism :
On Gene Roddenberry :
On romantic love:
On romantic love:
On safety:
On the Scientific atmosphere of the Present:
On Schubert :
On Scripture :
On self-awareness:
On Self-consciousness:
On Self-consciousness:
On Shadows :
It has only recently struck me that we need our shadow-casters,
metaphorically as well as physically. What in me casts shadows, and what
kind?"
On Shadows :
On the 'Shadow self' :
On silence:
On Stars :
On Star-watching :
On Success and Failure:
On the temporal vesus the eternal:
On thinking and speaking:
On Time:
On the Trinity:
On trust:
On trust:
On underestimating oneself:
On unforgiveness:
On "un-loving:"
On Unworthiness as an idol:
On Virtue:
On vocation:
On vulnerability and love:
On the Wildness of Christianity:
On Words:
On writing:
On why she started writing:
"Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what
television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought
to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image,
and further from reality."
(A Circle of Quiet, 16)
"...agape means "a profound concern for the welfare of another without any
desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the
process." Not easy. But if we can follow it, it will mean that we will never
exclude...It teaches me not only about forgiveness but about how to hope to
give guidance without manipulation.
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 159)
"Art should communicate with as many people as possible."
(WALKING ON WATER, 50)
"A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us,
and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation
behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with
competition, or degree of talent....This response on the part of any artist
is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through
the genius of someone else."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 147)
"...when you put something into words, it leads to so many other thoughts"
--Katherine Forrester
(THE SMALL RAIN, 122)
"Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go
control, be surprised."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 133)
"I've worked with a lot of artists, Em, and they all have a need
that cannot be met by another human being."
(CERTAIN WOMEN, 75)
"Perhaps the times I seem most sure are the times I am most unsure. A good
deal of the time I simply act, with great positiveness and very little
assurance. I have all the arrogance of utter insecurity."
--Violet Napier (THE LOVE LETTERS, 302)
"I've long since stopped feeling guilty about taking being time; it's
something we all need for our spiritual health, and often we don't take
enough of it."
(WALKING ON WATER, 12)
"I love the small group of women with whom I meet weekly to discuss whatever
book we have chosen and what it means in our lives and in our understanding
of Christ. We do not try to coerce each other, even when we disagree. We
try to listen to each other, and to God. Therefore, this group is for me
another icon, and one that helps me to keep my eyes and ears open, and my
mind ready to move and grow in understanding."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 36)
"Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the
butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light
years away."
(A Stone for a Pillow, 97)
"We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not
quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need
defending!"
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 184)
"The world is changing rapidly -- that terrifies people. We know a great
deal more now about
the nature of the universe than we used to, which I think makes it all the
more exciting. But change is frightening
to people. And when you get frightened, you strike out."
(Village Life Interview)
"It is far too easy to take refuge in our little groups, rather than
allowing the Creator to change us as he changed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
(A STONE FOR A PILLOW, 87)
"I really do understand that people change, as Wolfi said, not so much
from who we are as to who we are."
(A Severed Wasp, 133)
"The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox
and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no
problems of contrast."
(CIRCLE OF QUIET, 46)
"'Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about,' Charles Wallace said.
'Why should I disillusion them?'"
(A WRINKLE IN TIME, 32)
"If I have something that is too difficult for adults to swallow,
then I will write it in a book for children."
(Circle of Quiet, 198)
"My training in physics has taught me that there is no such thing as
coincidence."
(A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET, 30)
"A community to be truly community, must have a quality of
unselfconsciousness about it."
(THE IRRATIONAL SEASON, 177)
"My moments of being most complete, most integrated, have come either in
complete solitude or when I am being part of a body made up of many
people going in the same direction."
(The Irrational Season, 158)
"If I could comprehend God completely, God
wouldn't be worth bothering about. I'm finite, God is infinite; the finite
cannot comprehend the infinite. But we get enough glimpses."
(Village Life Interview)
The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration
of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration,
the child is not only outside time, he is outside *himself.* He has thrown
himself completely into whatever it is that he is doing. A child playing a
game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely *in* what he
is doing. His *self*-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly
focused outside himself.
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 10)
"When I start a new seminar, I tell my students that I will undoubtedly
contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance
of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our
minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot
take us all the way."
(A Circle of Quiet, 32)
"...this marvelous communal act - I wish I knew it more often in church,
and that I were a less reluctant Christian. The church is too grownup
for me, too reasonable, too limited."
(The Irrational Season, 159)
"So I go to church, not because of any legalistic or moralistic reasons,
but because I am a hungry sheep who needs to be fed; and for the same
reason that I wear a wedding ring: a public witness of a private
commitment."
(The Irrational Season, 143)
"The scientists think it likely that there may be other planets out there, but
this far nobody's been able to communicate with anybody else. Maybe we'd better
learn to communicate with each other first."
(from New Year's form-letter dated Feb 1997)
"Someone asked me about creation versus evolution," she says. "I said I can't get
very excited about it. There's only one question worth asking, and that is, 'Did God make it?' And if the answer is 'Yes,' then why
get so excited about it?"
(from Interview in MUSIC, MOVIES AND MATHEM webzine, 15 Jan 97)
"Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness
dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding,
neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm."
(A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET, 50)
"I look at Mother, and think that if I am to reflect on the eventual
death of her body, of all bodies, in a way that is not destructive, I
must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final,
physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom: the death of
self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices
which, instead of making us more fully alive, make us less."
(The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, 53)
"She had that spontaneous quality of aliveness which illuminates people who
have already done a lot of their dying, and I think I am beginning to
understand the truth of that."
(The Summer of the Great-grandmother, 180)
"An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define
everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 30-31)
"So dis-aster is separation from the stars."
(A STONE FOR A PILLOW, 17)
"Wherever there is unity in diversity, then we are free to be ourselves;
it cannot be done in isolation; we need each other."
(Circle of Quiet, 237)
"I am not in love and charity with this man, I thought, and therefore,
according to the rubrics, I should not go up to the altar. And yet I
knew that my only hope of love and charity was to go forward and receive
the elements."
(The Irrational Season, 118)
"Evangelism is who you are."
(12 Sept 96 lecture at Goshen College)
"Nothing important is completely explicable."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 164)
"We have false expectations of our holy days, of our churches, of each other.
We have false expectations of our friends. Jesus did not. He had
expectations, but they were not false, and when they were not met, he did not
fall apart. He was never taken in by golden calves!
Friendship not only takes time, it takes a willingness to drop false
expectations, of ourselves, of each other. Friends--or lovers--are not
always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing
when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be
giving understanding."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 36)
"There aren't any easy answers to the questions being raised today, and it may
be too easy for me to remember Jesus saying, "Greater love has no man than to
give up his life for his friend." Or wife, or children. Isn't staying with
your family sometimes a real equivalent of giving up your own life? Cannot
it sometimes be a blessing, especially if it is given with graciousness, not
rigid rectitude? I believe that it can, because I know of families where
this is what has happened.
Sacrifice is no longer popular, but I think that sometimes it can lead to
true joy. Even the simplest of unions does not come free. There is always
sacrifice."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 64)
"The seahorse might well be a symbol for the more extreme branches of
women's lib, because the female seahorse lays her eggs in the male's
pouchand then he has to carry eggs to term, go through labor pains
and bear the babies."
(THE IRRATIONAL SEASON, 43)
"What is forever? It cannot be in time, because time can be measured, and
forever cannot. Time is inextricably tangled up with place, and can be
measured only against place (dark of night in New York; grey of morning in
Beja). Time has meaning only in relation to its position in space, the
movement of a planet about a sun, of a night through stars."
(THE LOVE LETTERS, 164)
...Father Duarte said, "Before you can accept God's forgiveness you have to
forgive yourself. It is arrogance not to forgive yourself."
(THE LOVE LETTERS, 329)
"Celebration of Discipline won me when it was first
published...and there is even more need for Richard J. Foster's wisdom
today.... If everybody in this country could read--and heed--this book,
what a difference it would made to the planet; nay, to the Cosmos."
"SOPHIE'S WORLD is sheer delight. How I wish I'd had it during my
college freshman survey of philosophy!"
"The only God worth believing in is neither my pal in the house next
door nor an old gentleman shut up cozily in a coffin where he can't hurt
me. I can try to be simple with him, but not vulgar. He is the
mysterium tremendens et fascinans; he is free, and he understands the
ousia of this frightened old child of his."
(Summer of the Great-Grandmother, 142)
"(Meg, after watching a star be born in Wind in the Door
asked):
'Will the star be Named?'
(Progonoskis):'He calls them all by Name'
(Wind in the Door, 148)
"God says, 'I love you! I love you enough to come and be with you. And
because I live forever, you will, too.'"
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 35)
"Trouble always comes whenever we begin to take credit for any of the
gifts of the Spirit, be they gifts of prayer, tongues, prophecy, art,
science....Modern medicine suffers, despite all its advances, because it
has almost completely forgotten that healing is a gift as well as a
science."
(The Irrational Season, 124)
"The best way to help the world is to start by loving each other,
not blandly, blindly, but realistically, with understanding and
forebearance and forgiveness."
(New Year's Form letter, dated Feb 1997)
"The Holy Spirit came not only to comfort us, but to show us how to live in
Christ, and only as we are in Christ can we begin to understand the mysteries
of faith."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 78)
"No wonder I yell for a God I do not understand in times of stress.
Every time I've tried to depend on a human being it's been disastrous."
(A SEVERED WASP, 219)
"We are all inadequate; that is simply part of the human condition and
it's a major temptation to dwell on that rather than accepting and
understanding that we do the best we can and that is all that God
expects of us. Sometimes the best we can is far better than we think it
is."
(from a personal correspondence)
"There's the rub; an icon can far too easily become an idol. Idols always
bring disaster to the idolater. An icon is an open door to the Creator; when
it becomes an idol, the door slams in your face."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 39)
"I believe that we all have this dark underestimation of ourselves. Sometimes
it is masked as arrogance, overestimation, superiority, but underneath the
brashness the problem is insecurity and only unqualified, unmerited,
unconditional love can assuage it."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 94)
On Integrity:
"Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are
conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 130)
"I look at many of the brilliant, sophisticated intellectuals of my
generation, struggling through psychoanalysis, balancing sleeping pills
with waking pills, teetering on the thin edge of despair, and think that
perhaps they have not found the answer after all."
(A Circle of Quiet, 42)
"Intimacy between friends involves a nondominant love, as well as
vulnerability. With a true friend we can share the deepest places of our
hearts, the dark as well as the light. I have friends whose secrets will go
to the grave with me, as mine with them. We listen, we share, we laugh, we
accept. We seldom give advice, and when we do it is for love, not power. We
play together, and this is a special delight for me in my mid-seventies, to
have friends with whom I can play with the enthusiasm and whole-heartedness
of a child."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 24)
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There'd have been no room for the child.
("After Annunciation", WEATHER OF THE HEART)
"We pin him [Jesus] down, far more painfully than he was nailed to the
cross, so that he is rational and comprehensible and like us, and even
more unreal. And that won't do. That won't get me through death and
danger and pain, nor life and freedom and joy."
(The Irrational Season, 171)
"After the Resurrection Jesus was recognized not by his outer qualities--he
was never recognized by sight--but by his inner qualities, his Christ-self."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 40)
"And joy is always a promise."
(Circle of Quiet, 125)
"While I was writing A Wind In the Door, I spent a long time
finding the word I needed, and finally came across kythe in Jamieson's
Scottish Dictionary published in 1856, which I inherited from my
grandfather. The first definition is 'to be manifest'; the second, 'to
come in sight'; the third, 'to appear in proper character' and he quotes,
'he will kythe in his ain colours' with the explanation added, 'he will
appear without disguise.'"
(quoted in KYTHING: The Art of Spiritual Presence, by Louis M.
Savary and Patricia H. Berne, p. 17)
"My father answered the waiter in French, but his French, instead
of sounding all curves and music like Chopin or the ballet, was as square and angular as a problem in algebra."
(Camilla, p. 21)
"Only Christ can free us from the prison of legalism, and then only if we are
willing to be freed."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 85)
On lesbianism:
"Of course lesbianism exists, and has since the beginning of history, and we
have not always been compassionate. I thought it was now agreed that
consenting adults were not to be persecuted, particularly if they keep their
private lives private. We human beings are all in the enterprise of life
together, and the journey isn't easy for any of us."
(A House Like a Lotus, 111)
"What I think is that if we're still around after we die, it will be more
like those moments when we let go, than the way we are most of the time.
It'll be--it'll be the self beyond the self we know"
(A RING OF ENDLESS LIGHT, 168)
"I believe that consistently we need to look for good,and not for
evil, that when we look for evil we call up evil, while heaven comes
closer when we acknowledge it."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 181)
"When it's easy, it's sentimentality, not love. Love often says *no* when we
would like the answer to be *yes*."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 109)
"We are all supposed to be obedient to that love, but we forget love whenever
we want power over someone else. We human beings mess it up, over and over
again, but God comes into our lives to help us overcome our stiff-neckedness.
Indeed, God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son to live
with us and teach us how to be the fully human creatures our Maker has always
planned for us to be."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 46-47)
His voice was the barest whisper. "Love always has meaning. But sometimes
only God knows what it is."
--Father Duarte, (THE LOVE LETTERS, 231)
"Surely, George Macdonald is the grandfather of us all -- all who struggle
to come to terms with truth through fantasy."
"Honaria stood, holding the silver dish in a linen napkin. 'A human being
can do magic. God do the miracle. Magic make the person think the power be
in hisself. A miracle make him know the power belong to God'."
(The Other Side of the Sun, 293)
"If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start.
Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said, by
me. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own
will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little:
that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try." A
(Circle of Quiet, 28)
"She was far more interesting and far more important than she now gets
credit for. There's no indication whatsoever that she was a prostitute.
She had seven demons, and Jesus took
them away. She was obviously a highly literate and prominent woman who
worked very hard with Him and for
Him -- and was the first person to see Him after the Resurrection."
(Village Life Interview)
"To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take."
(THE IRRATIONAL SEASON, 47)
"If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many
people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to
move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is
permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation."
(The Irrational Season, 47)
"Six months after I started to write Wrinkle, I discovered higher math. And
for me, higher math is much easier than lower math. Lower math lost me in
4th grade when I was taught that 0 x 3 equals 0. Now, I understand that if I
have nothing and I multiply it by 0, 3 something's are not going to appear.
But, if I have 3 apples and I multiply them by 0, why are they going to
vanish? So I wiped out lower math as philosophically untenable."
(from the video, Madeleine L'Engle: Star Gazer - A Portrait of the Celebrated
Writer, Author of Wrinkle in Time)
"...I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired
only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to
be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling
threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take
myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously--to be, in fact, a true
adult."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 132)
"The books I read most as a child were by Lucy Maud Montgomery, who's best known
for her Anne of Green Gables stories, but I also liked Emily of New Moon. Emily
was an only child, as I was. Emily lived on an island, as did I. Although
Manhattan Island and Prince Edward Island are not very much alike, they are
still islands. Emily's father was dying of bad lungs, and so was mine. Emily had
some dreadful relatives, and so did I. She had a hard time in school, and she
also understood that there's more to life than just the things that can be
explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate. I loved
Emily."
(from the Bantam-Doubleday-Dell audio clip)
"I suppose it's arrogance or selfishness or something to care so much about
being loved that I could feel that no one loved me. It was only with Andrew
in all the world that I knew I was loved, that I was worth loving. Not
because of me, Charlotte, but because I was his mother. Not because I was a
good mother but because simply, biologically, I was his. No matter what I
was like, no matter how much I was lacking, I was still his mother, there was
this basic, primary fact that was there and that nothing could ever change,
not anything I did or didn't do. So I believed that he loved me. And so I
was--I was freed. With everybody else in the world I haven't believed it,
and so I haven't been free." She had never put this into words before; it
hurt to hear it, but it was true; it was Charlotte. "And if anybody is for a
moment gentle with me, then I am--I can't explain, I dissolve, I'm completely
undone"
(THE LOVE LETTERS, 160)
"We are the song of the universe. We sing with the angelic host.
We are the musicians. The farae and the stars arethe singers.
Our song orders the rhythm of creation."
(A WIND IN THE DOOR, 180)
"I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.
I Name you Calvin.
I Name you Mr. Jenkins.
I Name you Proginoskes.
I fill you with Naming.
Be!
Be, butterfly and behemoth,
be galaxy and grasshopper,
star and sparrow,
you matter,
you are,
be!
Be caterpillar and comet,
Be porcupine and planet,
sea sand and solar system,
sing with us,
dance with us,
rejoice with us,
for the glory of creation,
seagulls and seraphim
angle worms and angel host,
chrysanthemum and cherubim.
(O cherubim.)
Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us.
Be!"
(A WIND IN THE DOOR, 203-204)
"I also read quite lot in the area of particle physics and quantum
mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the
nature of being. This is what life is all about."
(Bantam/Doubleday/Dell Online Audio-clip)
"To put it into Euclid or old fashioned plane geometry, a staright line is
*not* the shortest distance between two points."
(WRINKLE IN TIME, 78)
"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am
always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods
and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be...
This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these
ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to
be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide...
Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means,
and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and
smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old
or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people
I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I
don't ever want to be one.
Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be*
fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 199-200)
"In these increasingly more sound-polluted and frenetic years, Henri
Nouwen's simple words about the prayer of the heart will be helpful for
all who seek to turn from the complex wiles of the world to the
simplicity of the love of God."
"If it has to be *mine* it is an idol."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 50)
"It's a peculiar thing about pain. We can help each other bear it. Not just
by caring, by making it bearable because we care - though that helps...Mado
did it by prayer. She took people's pain and she bore some of it for them.
I don't understand this, but I've seen it happen...It wasn't just my
imagination. Theron saw it too. He saw a wounded man who should have been
in agony resting quitely because Mado was bearing part of his pain."
(Other Side of the Sun, 220)
"We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to."
(WALKING ON WATER, 36)
"Those who do not believe in a loving God do not enjoy parties!."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 49)
"The way of peacemaking given us may be something so small that it seems hardly worth
doing, but it is these small offerings which build our reflexes for the larger ones."
(The Irrational Season, 85)
"Play is part of intimacy, and in our busy world we don't play enough."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 24)
"We've become too polite. We don't laugh and cry with God. We've forgotten
the excitement of the Good News. What greater sign of the extraordinary,
lavish marvelous love of God than the incarnation! God so loved the world
and all of us in it that God elself came to live with us as one of us! Is it
so good that we're afraid to believe it?"
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 48)
"We can pray for those we love in far off places knowing that our prayer is there instantly. It transcends time. Prayer breaks the
boundaries of time."
(from Interview in MUSIC, MOVIES AND MATHEM webzine, 15 Jan 97)
"Prayer was never meant to be magic," Mother said.
"Then why bother with it?" Suzy scowled.
"Because it's an act of love," Mother said.
(A Ring Of Endless Light, 288-289)
"When we pray with the mind in the heart, sunside and nightside are
integrated, we begin to heal, and we come close to the kind of
understanding which can accept an unacceptable Christianity."
(The Irrational Season, 21)
"... I simply take him into my heart, and then put him into God's hand."
(said by Grandfather to Vicky)
(A Ring Of Endless Light, 298)
Joaquina stared with hostility at the shriveled little nun. "I don't demand
any more of my Sisters than I do of myself. But when I demand a great deal
of myself it always seems to be pride."
"Demanding of oneself is not pride, child. It is being disappointed in
oneself that is pride."
"But how can one help being disappointed in oneself?"
"One can't," Mother Escolastica said, and left Joaquina standing in the
darkness just outside the chapel.
(THE LOVE LETTERS, 325)
"There's a theory which I take seriously," Katherine said,"that we live
until we do whatever we do whatever we're meant to do. Mozart started
composing at an incredibly early age, and when he died young he had
accomplished the purpose for which he was born."
(A Severed Wasp, 131)
"Then there are real people.
They're a very small class, and very wonderful. They're not creators,
they're not artists, but they can understand and appreciate consciously..."
--Katherine Forrester, (THE SMALL RAIN, 207)
"No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of
creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no
creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of
love."
(The Irrational Season, 97)
"When you are a religious fanatic, the cause of your religion is all that matters,
not human life."
(A SEVERED WASP, 221)
"When Gene Roddenberry gave the world Star Trek, he opened the minds and hearts of more than one generation to new ways of seeing
and perceiving the human endeavor in this complex universe."
(From a review of the book: Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation )
"Love isn't how you feel, it's what you do."
(Wind in the Door, 118)
"Love can often do peculiar things to senses of humor."
(ILSA, 163)
"The house of God is not a safe place."
(A STONE FOR A PILLOW, 18)
"We're right now at a new paradigm shift, and I don't think any
of us have really caught on to it, but it is far
more terrifying than anything that Darwin suggested."
(from Interview in MUSIC, MOVIES AND MATHEM webzine, 15 Jan 97)
"You can always tell Schubert by that sadness that's under everything he
writes, even the merriest stuff." --Emma
(CERTAIN WOMEN, 53)
"The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect
for our Maker to love us."
(A STONE FOR A PILLOW, 46)
"Well," I said, "I remember I turned on the light and stood
in front of the mirror, looking at myself, frightened because people thought
when they were getting ready for bed, and didn't think about me because I wasn't the most
important thing in their lives at all. Mother and Father'd always made me
feel that I was important, and now all of a sudden I realized I wasn't. How
can you be important when nobody knows about you? It very frightening to
realize you aren't important after all." (Camilla Dickinson)
(Camilla, 124)
"When we are *self*-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw
ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.
So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work,
then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also
escape our self-conscious selves.
The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find
illuminating: *hubris*: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in
the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind
of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation...
...The moment that humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. One
cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time. Therefore, the act
of creating--painting a picture, singing a song, writing a story--is a humble
act? This was a new thought to me. Humility is throwing oneself away in
complete concentration on something or someone else.
...that special kind of creative courage which is unself-conscious: the
moment you wonder whether or not you can do it, you can't."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 11)
"In true love, the lover's pleasure comes in giving himself wholly to the
loved one. When we try to give ourselves to ourselves, that is not only
perversion, it is ultimately suicide...
Mostly, no matter how inadequate my playing, the music is all that matters:
I am outside time, outside self, in play, in joy. When we can play with the
unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.
...Ah, surely it is vain to think about words of praise. It is permissible
for us to be pleased that a job has been well done, but we can't take any
personal credit for it. We can only be grateful that the work itself knocks
self-consciousness out of the way, for it is only thus that the work can be
done."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 12-13)
" In Egypt, I learned why the women drew black lines of kohl around their eyes:
to produce shadow, to protect their eyes from the fierceness of the sun. We
see because of the sun, but if there were no shadows that light would
quickly blind us. We need the shadows of buildings to protect us at least a
little from heat.
(from Parabola magazine, Summer 1997)
"What is my own shadow? If we all had the ability to recognize our shadows we
might not be driven by them."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 134)
"A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest
understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least
aware most of the time."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 133)
"With the people I love most I can sit in silence indefinitely. We need both
for our full development; the joy of the sense of sound; and the equally
great joy of its absence."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 134)
"Stars have always been an icon of creation for me."
(A STONE FOR A PILLOW, 18)
"If you want to see the stars you must go out into the country where there
are no lights to dim them. But if you *really* want to see the stars then
you must be out in the middle of the ocean. Then you can see them as the
sailors and navigators saw them in the days when stars were known as very
few people know them now."
(ARM OF THE STARFISH, 16)
"[Success has] made me free to go out to meet people without tangling in the
pride which is an inevitable part of the sense of failure. W. Somerset
Maugham said, "The common idea that success spoils people by making them
vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes
them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people
bitter and cruel."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 141)
"For the
things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen
are eternal."
Aunt Beast, (A WRINKLE IN TIME, 186).
"Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than
when we have time to think."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 41)
"But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing
slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty
themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn.
Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second
hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around
goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and
of months, and of years."
(THE SMALL RAIN, 152).
"The Trinity is the icon of human family, and the wholeness and holiness of
the Trinity is a mystery, so we should not be surprised that the family is a
mystery, too."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 56)
"I believe that people become trusworthy only by being trusted.....I'm
infinitely more trustworthy because of my wife's faith in me...
When we fall as we always do, we pick ourselves up and start again. And when
our trust is betrayed the only response that is not destructive is to trust
again. Not stupidly you understand, but fully aware of the facts, we still
have to trust.
"
(The Young Unicorns, 170-171)
"If a man trusts no man, then he cannot trust God."
Dr. Ball, (THE ARM OF THE STARFISH, 154).
Violet sat on the white brocade of the chaise longue. "It is not clever to
underestimate yourself"
(THE LOVE LETTERS, 165)
"To be in a state of unforgiveness is to know hell, at least in a small
way."
(A STONE FOR A PILLOW, 60)
"To deny friendship is unlove."
(A House Like a Lotus, 293)
"Refusing to accept God's love because we're unworthy--of course we're
unworthy!--is another golden calf."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 48)
"And what did I mean by trying to 'be good'? To knock down selfishness,
self-will, I suppose, and this is no do-it-yourself job. We can no more 'try'
to be virtuous than we can tryto be humble, or to act with integrity."
(CIRCLE OF QUIET, 257)
"(Speaking about Wrinkle) I loved the book. It gave me a real sense of my
work as vocation, not just career. And I was not prepared for the long,
long, string of rejections."
(from the video, Madeleine L'Engle: Star Gazer - A Portrait of the Celebrated
Writer, Author of Wrinkle in Time)
"When we make ourselves vulnerable, we do open ourselves
to pain, sometimes excruciating pain. The more people we love, the more
we are liable to be hurt, and not only by the people we love, but for
the people we love."
(PENGUINS AND GOLDEN CALVES, 20)
"What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite
comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful,
benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human
vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all
for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some
Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other
Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than
one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God's love, a love we don't even
have to earn."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 31)
"When we use words to put down, to divide, we are falling into idolatry."
(Penguins and Golden Calves, 26)
"I don't like writing two books of the same genre in a row."
(12 Sept 96 lecture at Goshen College)
"I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father,
before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to
know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn't get
along together, and what made people tick. That's why I started to write
stories."
(Bantam/Doubleday/Dell Online Audio-clip)
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