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.
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.
But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don’t want that kind of God.
Everything that we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off.
We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don’t understand what we’re timing.
In a world where pleasure rules, people tend to be underdeveloped in every other way.
The answer has something to do with love. Love that has to go through darkness and pain and endurance and a stark acceptance before it can come out into the far light of the sun.
And I was, as clearly as I can express something that is really unexpressible, out on the other side of fear.
God doesn’t stop the bad things from happening; that’s never been part of the promise. The promise is: I am with you. I am with you now until the end of time.
Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.
The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I.