Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn’t mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one’s own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.
I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then.
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.
Don’t be afraid to be afraid.
Oh, my darling you are not dumb,” her father answered. “You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.
If you accept any position of authority you have to know when to break or circumvent a rule. It’s the knowing when that’s important.
You matter. You are. Be.
My daughter, I am not a Mrs Whatsit, a Mrs Who, or a Mrs Which. Yes, Calvin has told me everything he could. I am a human being, and a very fallible one. But I agree with Calvin. We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
The stones do not tell us what is going to happen, or what we are to do, any more than the stars. They speak to us only of our present position in the great pattern. Where we are now; here. Sometimes that helps us to see the pattern more clearly. That is all.
No, it was not anger, it was loathing; it was hatred, sheer and unadulterated, and as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT.
You might call IT the Boss.” Then Charles Wallace giggled, a giggle that was the most sinister sound Meg had ever heard. “IT sometimes calls ITself the Happiest Sadist.
The stars do not foretell, because what has not happened must be free to happen, as it will.
She screamed out... and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know.
Hate is like cancer, separate from the normal cells, devouring and not being nourished, annihilating itself along with everything it attacks.
Life... is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
In a reverse way, sharing my mother’s long, slow dying consumes my creative energy. I manage one angry and bitter story, and feel better for it, but most of me is involved in Mother’s battle. Watching her slowly being snuffed out is the opposite of pregnancy, depleting instead of fulfilling: I am exhausted by conflict.
I can’t do it for love of God, like Tom Tallis, or for heaven’s sake, as Mr. Frost said. But because I love people I have to act according to it – to the fact that I love them.
Maybe you have to know the darkness to truly appreciate the light.” – Madeleine L’Engle.
Meg cut up some celery and mixed it in with the tuna. After a moment’s hesitation she opened the refrigerator door and brought out a jar of little sweet pickles.-Though why I’m doing it for her I don’t know, she thought, as she cut them up.-I don’t trust her one bit.
And another lovely paradox: we can be humble only when we know that we are God’s children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.