Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them.—Ditta

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.

In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

A great ring of pure & endless lightDazzles the darkness in my heartAnd breaks apart the dusky clouds of night.The end of all is hinted in the start.When we are born we bear the seeds of blight;Around us life & death are torn apart,Yet a great ring of pure and endless lightDazzles the darkness in my heart.It lights the world to my delight.Infinity is present in each part.A loving smile contains all art.The motes of starlight spark & dart.A grain of sand holds power & might.Infinity is present in each part,And a great ring of pure and endless lightDazzles the darkness in my heart.

Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.

We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

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 acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way.

Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.

Our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.

Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It's a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here i am afflicted with it at my tender age.

I had never seen the end of day and the beginning of the night greet each other. We were caught in the loveliness between the two. A House Like a Lotus

Love does not judge.

How long your closet held a whiff of you,Long after hangers hung austere and bare.I would walk in and suddenly the trueSharp sweet sweat scent controlled the airAnd life was in that small still living breath.Where are you? since so much of you is here,Your unique odour quite ignoring death.My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dearAnd vital in my longing empty arms.But other clothes fill up the space, your space,And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.Not of your odour there is not a trace.But something unexpected still breaks throughThe goneness to the presentness of you.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command....I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of teh work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even changes that which we so zealously think we know.

People are afraid of knowledge that is not yet theirs.

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.

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

Mr Jenkins. Unique, as every star in the sky is unique, every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every farandola, every cherubim, unique: Named.

Who makes you least confused?""Calvin" There was no hesitation here. "When I'm with Calvin, I don't mind being me""You mean he makes you more you, don't you?""I guess you could put it that way.

People are more than just the way they look.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

If I do wrong, I may do it unwittingly, thinking I am doing something for the best; but if it turns out to be wrong, I have done it, and I must bear the responsibility. It is not somebody else’s or something else’s fault. If it is I am less than human. Like everybody else, I tend to rationalize and alibi, before I let myself admit, “Yes, I did this. I am sorry. I will do what I can to make reparation.” Our sins defeat us unless we are willing to recognize them, confess them, and become healed and whole and holy—not qualified, mind you; just holy.

Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that "the people" do no want freedom.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…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…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

She knew that the freedom was in herself, just as the prison had been.

Two people whose opinion I respect told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. This certainly says something about the state of Christianity today. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is; I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities; I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who today can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one another?

In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am, Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' For our sakes Jesus went through all the suffering we may ever have to endure, and because he cried out those words we may cry them out, too.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

Art is communication.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God.

What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.

The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work has been stillborn.

Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

In reading we must become creators.

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

The author & the reader "know" each other: they meet on the bridge of words

Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.

The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!

The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.

Lords of fire and earth and water,Lords of moon and wind and sky,Come now to the Old Man's daughter,Come from fathers long gone by.Bring blue from a distance eye.Lords of water, earth, and fire,Lords of wind and snow and rain,Give to my heart's desire.Life as all life comes with pain,But blue will come to us again.

--So we reached our decisions simultaneously, and apart, and if I knew that Court was fighting a battle, did he, too, sense mine? Did it have anything to do with his coming back to life again? For he is here, I am no longer living with a marble image. And I will never know why. Court being Court I can never ask him why; we wrestled with our problems alone and we must live alone with the answers. And is it part of a marriage, part of being a human being, that we must always reach our decisions alone?

Charles Wallace and the unicorn moved through the time-spinning reaches of a far glazy, and he realized that the galaxy itself was part of a mighty orchestra, and each star and planet within the galaxy added its own instrument to the music of the spheres. As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

At Tara in this fateful hour,I place all Heaven with its power,And the sun with its brightness,And the snow with its whiteness,And the fire with all the strength it hath,And the lightning with its rapid wrath,And the winds with their swiftness along their path,And the sea with its deepness,And the rocks with their steepness,And the earth with its starkness:All these I place,By God's almighty help and graceBetween myself and the powers of darkness!

The well-intentioned mothers who don't want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.

Growing up is a process that never ends. It isn't a point you attain so you can say, Hooray, I'm grown up. Some people never grow up. And nobody ever finishes growing. Or shouldn't. If you stop you might as well quit. What I have to tell you is that it never gets any easier. It goes right on being rough forever. But nothing that's easy is worth anything. You ought to have learned that by now. What happens as you keep on growing is that all of a sudden you realize that it's more exciting and beautiful than scary and awful.

You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

The story comes, and it is pure story. That's all I set out to write. But I don't believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.

Lords of spirit, Lords of breath,Lords of fireflies, stars, and light,Who will keep the world from death?Who will stop the coming night?Blue eyes, blue eyes, have the sight.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

She was enfolded in the great wings of Mrs. Whatsit and she felt comfort and strength pouring through her. Mrs. Whatsit was not speaking aloud, and yet through the wings Meg understood words."My child, do not despair. Do you think we would have brought you here if there was no hope? We are asking you to do a difficult thing, but we are confident that you can do it. Your father needs help, he needs courage, and for his children he may be able to do what he cannot do for himself.

We want them to see their home planet," Mrs. Whatsit said. The Medium lost the delighted smile she had worn till then. "Oh, why must you make me look at unpleasant things when there are so many delightful ones to see?"Again Mrs. Which's voice reverberated through the cave. "There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people do not do something about the unpleasant ones.

We are going to your father," Mrs. Which said. "But where is he?" Meg went over to Mrs. Which and stamped as though she were as young as Charles Wallace. Mrs. Whatsit answered in a voice that was low but quite firm. "On a planet that has given in. So you must prepare to be very strong.

But what is real? In the Bible we are constantly being given glimpses of a reality quite different from that taught in school, even in Sunday school. And these glimpses are not given to the qualified; there's the marvel. It may be that the qualified feel no need of them.

Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers--ugly. No! I don't want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.

One thing I have discovered since I've been ill, though, is that nobody ever knows anybody, and maybe least of all the people who are closest to them. Sort of a business of not being able to see the trees for the woods. We all live in isolated prisons of our own bodies and there's no real contact with any other human being. That's what sex is, in a way, isn't it, a desperate striving for contact? With which cheerful Thought for Today, I will bid you good afternoon.

He knew what she wanted, and he wanted it, too; he was ready, but not, despite her gorgeousness, with Tiglah. Tiglah was not worth losing his ability to touch a unicorn.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

Our children... have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, "If a [man's] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.

The child is aware of unlimited potential, and this munificence is one of the joys of creativity.Those of use who struggle in our own ways, small or great, trickles or rivers, to create, are constantly having to unlearn what the world would teach us...

I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religiousorder. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young peopleinto an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our childrenreceive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun,for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world asnever before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, orwhat I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoidby providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.

I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group...If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed. Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth.

... scar tissue was the strongest tissue in the human body.

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts...

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.

In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind.

Very few of us understand Honorable Bird, except to acknowledge that without his power and grace nothing would be written, painted, or composed at all. To say anything beyond this about the creative process is like pulling all the petals off a flower in order to analyze it, and ending up having destroyed the flower.

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

Believing takes practice.

Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don’t forget that he never promised he’d say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing . . . . That he cares . . . That is all. Nothing else.

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.

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.

One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.

Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It's not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That's not what it's really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things we learn from.

If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.

Lords of melody and song,Lords of roses burning bright,Blue will right the ancient wrong,Though the way is dark and long,Blue will shine with loving light.

We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

And we're not alone, you know, children," came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. "All through the universe, it's being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it's a grand and exciting battle. I know it's hard for you to understand about size, how there's very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy. You think about that, and maybe it won't seem strange to you that some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it's done so well.""Who have our fighters been? Calvin asked."Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs. Whatsit said. Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly. "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!""Of course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

... Papa's always had the ability to remember the good things and let the bad ones go." "Not a bad ability.""... I'm not sure. I think we have to remember it all before we can forgive it.

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.

And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

In your language you have a form of poetry called a sonnet...It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not?...There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?...And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?''No.''But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn't he?''Yes." Calvin nodded again.'So,' said Mrs. Whatsit.'So what?''Oh, do not be stupid, boy!' Mrs. Whatsit scolded. 'You know perfectly well what I am driving at!''You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but with freedom within it?''Yes,' Mrs. Whatsit said. "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure...

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.

Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.

Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.

Women in Jesus' day were less than second-class citizens.

Jesus, who comes across in the Gospels as extraordinarily strong, begged in the garden, with drops of sweat like blood running down his face, that he might be spared the terrible cup ahead of him, the betrayal and abandonment by his friends, death on the cross. Because Jesus cried out in anguish, we may too. But our fear is less frequent and infinitely less if we are close to the Creator. Jesus, having cried out, then let his fear go, and moved on.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything.... It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would NOT make everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of the master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God's ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.

Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us.

I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!

It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can't explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn't happen very often. But I obey it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That's all I know, kid. I'm not holding anything back. Maybe it's because I'm supposed to meet you. You tell me.

Meg looked. The dark shadow was still there. It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night. And where the shadow was, the stars were not visible.What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort?

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Do you think things always have an explanation? "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Listen, she said, "cherubim have come to my planet before.""I know that. Where do you think I got my information?""What do you know about us?""I have heard that your host planet is shadowed, that it is troubled.""It is beautiful," Meg said defensively.She felt a rippling of his wings. "In the middle of your cities?""Well-no-but I don't live in a city.""And is your planet peaceful?""Well-no-it isn't very peaceful.""I had the idea," Proginoskes moved reluctantly within her mind, "that there are wars on your planet. People fighting and killing each other.""Yes, that's so, but-""And children go hungry.""Yes.""And people don't understand each other.""Not always.""And there's-there's hate?""Yes."She felt Proginoskes pulling away. "All I want to do," he was murmuring to himself, "is go some place quiet and recite the names of the stars...

Why does anybody do anything?" Mimi asked impatiently. "Most of the time we don't know--any of us.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.-Aunt Beast

There're a lot of things you don't understand." Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. "I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma's death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it

Meg’s eyes were too bright. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

Hate is like cancer, separate from the normal cells, devouring and not being nourished, annihilating itself along with everything it attacks.

From the shoulders, slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry. Calvin fell to his knees. "No," Mrs. Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs. Whatsit's voice. "Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.

She was silent; the great wings almost stopped moving; only a delicate stirring seemed to keep them aloft. "Listen, then," Mrs. Whatsit said. The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt that she could almost reach out and touch them: "Sing unto the Lord a new song, and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that there is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord!

We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.

Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other. That was surely the purest kind of thing.Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.

Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence.

Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this — and out of nothing — can still count the hairs of my head.

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers...To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy...If I try self consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals

we’re all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can’t tell which is which

A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.

I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.

All right, all right, you go right on thinking you an act of God created in his image, and I’ll go right on thinking I’m descended from an ape. When you look in the mirror I should think you’d feel pretty discouraged; I wouldn’t be happy to look at myself and think that my faces is an Imago Dei. It wouldn’t make me feel I’d done very well by God. But when I look in the mirror and that I’m descended from an ape, I feel I’ve done remarkably well.

Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

Charles Wallace, the danger here is greatest for you." "Why?""Because of what you are. Just exactly because of what you are you will be by far the most vulnerable. You must stay with Meg and Calvin. You must not go off on your own. Beware of pride and arrogance, Charles, for they may betray you.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.

It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to be stopped. It's all crazy. . . . Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but *he* is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.

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.

They've never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was so bad that I could have made better time with a horse.

It was still twilight when they reached the flat rock. They sat, and the stone still held the warmth of the day's sun. At first there were only occasional sparkles, but as it got darker Chuck was lost in a daze pf delight as a galaxy of fireflies twinkled on and off, flinging upward in a blaze of light, dropping earthward like falling stars, moving in contiuous effervescent dance.

If I'm confused, or upset, or angry, if I can go out and look at the stars I'll almost always get back a sense of proportion. It's not that they make me feel insignificant; it's the very opposite; they make me feel that everything matters, be it ever so small, and that there's meaning to life even when it seems most meaningless.

It was a star," Mrs. Whatsit said sadly. "A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won, oh, yes, my children, it won. But it lost its life in the winning.

I didn't mean to tell you," Mrs. Whatsit faltered. "I didn't mean ever to let you know. But oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!" "Yyouu are sstill verry yyoungg," Mrs Witch said, her voice faintly chiding. The Medium sat looking happily at the star-filled sky in her ball, smiling, and nodding and chuckling gently. But Meg noticed that her eyes were drooping, and suddenly her head fell forward and she gave a faint snore."Poor thing," Mrs Whatsit said, "we've worn her out. It's very hard work for her.

I was at the annual meeting of a state library association a few years later, when the children were in the process of leaving the nest, and one of the librarians asked me, "What do you think you and Hugh have done which was the best for your children?"I answered immediately and without thinking, "We love each other.

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

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 seraphimangle worms and angel host,chrysanthemum and cherubim.(O cherubim.)Be!Sing for the gloryof the living and the lovingthe flaming of creationsing with usdance with usbe with us.Be!"- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

Emily looked over at Courtney. He was still asleep. For a long time she had thought that if you loved anyone you had to tell him everything: go to him and confess as in the dream; there could be no secrets. But now in the dark of early morning with the copper bottle cold against her fee she felt that this desire to tell all was simply an evasion of responsibility, a weakness in wanting to push on to the person you love something that is your own responsibility to solve. It would be easier for her to tell Courtney all about Abe, to come to him as he sat at this desk in the chill little workroom and confess, to hand the responsibility for her ambivalence to him, to let him settle the problem of her puny conscience for her.But I know, she thought, lying there beside him on Madame Pedroti's lumpy bed, that if I love Courtney that is the last thing I must do. If I love Courtney he must never know.

As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.

Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.

I am slowly coming to understand with all my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?

Nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

Lords of space and Lords of time,Lords of blessing, Lords of grace,Who is in the warmer clime?Who will follow Madoc's rhyme?Blue will alter time and space.

In a world where pleasure rules, people tend to be undeveloped in every way. " A House Like a Lotus

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.

I would, quite often, like to be grownup, wise, and sophisticated. But these gifts are not mine.

The foolish of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of god is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that may not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath choses the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And bade things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

Grandfather looked away from me and out to sea, and when he spoke, it was as though he spoke to himself. “The obligations of normal human kindness – chesed, as the Hebrew has it – that we all owe. But there’s a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There’s a kind of vanity in goodness.”I could hardly believe my ears. “But aren’t we supposed to be good?”“I’m not sure.” Grandfather’s voice was heavy. “I do know that we’re not good, and there’s a lot of truth to the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Calvin said, "Do you know that this is the first time I've seen you without your glasses?""I'm blind as a bat without them. I'm near-sighted, like father.""Well, you know what, you've got dream-boat eyes," Calvin said. "Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.

Of course. I am well aware that the streets of New York are not safe, but then there is no longer any place in the world which is safe. One cannot live in perpetual fear, one has to be as prudent as possible, and get on with life. - A Severed Wasp

Being alive hurts. I have found it best not to rush for the aspirin bottle. - A Severed Wasp

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business...

All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.

We're not peculiar.""Oh, yes, you are. Don't you realize that in my world my parents are peculiar because they'd never been divorced? Basically because it would have been too much trouble. But you live in a world where not only are your parents not divorced, they appear to love each other

One night after dinner a group of us were talking about the supernatural, and one of our dinner guests said that when the electric light was invented, people began to lose the dimension of the supernatural. In the days before we could touch a switch and flood every section of the room with light, there were always shadows in the corner, shadows which moved with candlelight, with firelight; and these shadows were an outward and visible sign that things are not always what they seem; there are things which are not visible to the mortal human being; there are things beyond our ken.

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.

Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love. That’s how it works best.

Lords of blue and Lords of gold,Lords of wind and waters wild,Lords of time that's growing old,When will come the season mild?When will come blue Madoc's child?

We all tend to make zealous judgement, and thereby close ourselves off from revelation.

And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.

But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.

We cannot always cry at the right timeand who is to say which time is right?

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.

Some of these questions don't have finite answers, but the questions themselves are important. Don't stop asking, and don't let anybody tell you the questions aren't worth it. They are.

Questions are disturbing, especially those which may threaten our traditions, our institutions, our security. But questions never threaten the living God, who is constantly calling us, and who affirms for us that love is stronger than hate, blessings stronger than cursing.

Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.

Right now I am like the unborn baby in the womb, knowing nothing except the comforting warmth of the amniotic fluid in which I swim, the comforting nourishment entering my body from a source I cannot see or understand. My whole being comes from an unseen, unknown nurturer. By that nurturer I am totally loved and protected, and that love is forever. It does not end when I am precipitated out of the safe waters of the womb into the unsafe world. It will. It end when I breathe my last, mortal breath. That love manifested itself joyously in the creation of the universe, became particular for us in Jesus, and will show itself most gloriously in the Second Coming. We need not fear.

When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.

but BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time.

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.

There’s no such thing as an unbreakable scientific rule, because, sooner or later, they all seem to get broken. Or to change.

There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.

Because you're not what I would have you be I blind myself to who in truth you are.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

Is it that bad, Mrs. Bowen?" Clement asked.Emily shook her head. "Gertrude's been hurt and so she's generalizing. It's a pretty good country on the whole, and the people in it, too. We have our faults and they may be glaring, and we have individuals we may not be proud of, but take us by and large we'll stick our necks our for something we believe in, and that in itself may be a fault, but it's one I like.""Bravo," Abe said.