If you’re too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.
I feel as though I’m not breathing when I’m out of his presence. He’s the oxygen in my air, the sun in my universe, the staff of my life. – Jane Gardiner.
If I didn’t get fond I could be happy all the time.
Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.
If we aren’t capable of being hurt we aren’t capable of feeling joy.
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.”
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.
Art is communication.
Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.
We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God’s name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don’t believe in him.
Don’t keep putting your anger off. Until you go through it, you can’t get out of it.
All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.
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.
To write for children at all is an act of faith.
In reading we must become creators.
Like and equal are not the same thing at all. – Meg Murray.
We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.
Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go.
As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.