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.
And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.
If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.
Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.
Believing takes practice.
You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.
We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.
Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.
That’s something I’ve noticed about food: whenever there’s a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.
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.
It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them – and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on – this desperate need – and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.