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.
Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. It stops us from taking anything for granted. It has also taught me about living in the immediate moment.
Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.
As a child, when I came across a word I didn’t know, I didn’t stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.
Idiot,” Proginoskes said, anxiously rather than crossly. “Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do.
It hasn’t happened yet, nuclear war. No missiles have been sent. As long as it hasn’t happened, there’s a chance that it may not happen.
But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.
It really helped ever so much because it made me mad, and when I’m mad I don’t have room to be scared.
The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.
I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.
We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even changes that which we so zealously think we know.