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.
The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.
I heard a doctor say that the living tend to withdraw emotionally from the dying, thereby driving them deeper into isolation. Not to withdraw takes tremendous strength. To pull back is a temptation; it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as remaining open.
Somehow or other, the loving parents had swallowed one of the Tempter’s hooks, and the child was given total self-indulgence, which is far from free will. He still tempts. The ancient, primordial battle to destroy Community, to shatter Trinity, still continues. Creation still groans with the pain of it. Like it or not, we’re caught in the middle.
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.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’... I am grateful that Jesus cried out those words, because it means that I need never fear to cry them out myself. I need never fear, nor feel any sense of guilt, during the inevitable moments of forsakenness. They come to us all. They are part of the soul’s growth.
But I love her. That’s the funny part of it. I love them all, and they don’t give a hoot about me. Maybe that’s why I call when I’m not going to be home. Because I care. Nobody else does. You don’t know how lucky you are to be loved.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind.
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.
You must understand with your hearts. With the whole of yourselves, not just a fragment.
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!
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.
I like to understand things,” Meg said. “We all do. But it isn’t always possible.
And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.
You’re much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren’t,” Mrs. Murry said.
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.
Think of the person you love the most in the world. Do you really see them visually? Or don’t you see on a much deeper level? It’s lots easier to visualize people we don’t know very well.
It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe.
When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta 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.