But human beings need Deepening Places, too. And far too many never have any.
The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness. Picasso says that an artist paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share – he cannot help it – what he has found.
William Langland, writing around 1400, said, ‘And all the wickedness in the world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea.
All I knew was that at almost fifteen it’s very difficult to be satisfied with the age you are, because you aren’t really any age.
It is not the vaccinationists but the antivaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.
But, oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!” -Mrs. Whatsit, A Wrinkle in Time.
It is the nature of love to create, and no matter what we do to creation, that love is still there, creating; in the young man who is holding his jacket closed across his chest; in you; in me.
Children are less easily frightened than we are... they all understand princesses, of course. Haven’t they all been badly bruised by peas?
All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men remain silent and do nothing.
Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?” “I give up. Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?” “Professional courtesy.
I’m too young and the world is too old.
We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethans used “um” and “er” the way we do?
I was filled with anxiety that something might happen to him while we were far from home. I did not voice my fear or write about them in my journal, because that would have given them a reality I desperately desired to avoid.
We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a sense of family, of belonging to each other. No wonder our kids are struggling to start communes.
I’ve looked for an image in someone else’s mirror, and so have avoided seeing myself.
We want nothing from you that you do without grace,” Mrs Whatsit said, “or that you do without understanding.
Plato also wrote – and I lettered this in firm italic letters and posted it on my dorm-room door – All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.
The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware.
What I remember from Ruskin is the phrase the cursed animosity of inanimate objects, which I mutter under my breath when I get in a tangle of wire coat hangers. I also wonder if there is any such thing as an inanimate object.
One theory I find rather comforting is that time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.