If a book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.
Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.
We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.
What happens to what’s happened?
One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal.
IT was the most horrible, the most repellent thing she had ever seen, far more nauseating then anything she had ever imagined with her consious mind, or that had ever tormented her in her most terrible nightmares.
I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don’t have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?
How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I ‘believe’ for two minutes once every month or so, I’m doing well.
A book, too, can be a star ’explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.
There’re a lot of things you don’t understand.” Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. “I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn’t seem worth it. It wasn’t you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma’s death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it.
We do not know what things look like, as you say,” the beast said. “We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing.
I am slowly coming to understand with all my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has obtained liberation from self.
And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.
One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.
That was surely the purest kind of kything. Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.
If we knew ahead of time what was going to happen we’d be – we’d be like the people on Camazotz, with no lives of our own, with everything all planned and done for us.
There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.