Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.
Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. – Mrs. Whatsit
It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.
But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I’m cold I can warm my hands at them.—Ditta
We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.
Aeschylus writes, “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.
Our country in general assumes that “the pursuit of happiness” really means “the pursuit of pleasure” and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.
Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It’s a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here i am afflicted with it at my tender age.
If it can be verified, we don’t need faith… Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.
Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.
Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
It’s not my brain that’s writing the book, it’s these hands of mine.
The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.
People are afraid of knowledge that is not yet theirs.
A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.
A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
Mr Jenkins. Unique, as every star in the sky is unique, every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every farandola, every cherubim, unique: Named.
Who makes you least confused?””Calvin” There was no hesitation here. “When I’m with Calvin, I don’t mind being me””You mean he makes you more you, don’t you?””I guess you could put it that way.
She knew that the freedom was in herself, just as the prison had been.
Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do no want freedom.
In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.
To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ For our sakes Jesus went through all the suffering we may ever have to endure, and because he cried out those words we may cry them out, too.
Basically there can be no categories such as ‘religious’ art and ‘secular’ art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore ‘religious.
When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.
If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.
The author & the reader “know” each other: they meet on the bridge of words
Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.
The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.
Come t’e’ picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!
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.
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.
You don’t want him for a reason. You want him because he’s your father.
The story comes, and it is pure story. That’s all I set out to write. But I don’t believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.
Lords of spirit, Lords of breath,Lords of fireflies, stars, and light,Who will keep the world from death?Who will stop the coming night?Blue eyes, blue eyes, have the sight.
We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.
He knew what she wanted, and he wanted it, too; he was ready, but not, despite her gorgeousness, with Tiglah. Tiglah was not worth losing his ability to touch a unicorn.
An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.
Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.
The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.
… scar tissue was the strongest tissue in the human body.
Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts…
In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind.
Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don’t forget that he never promised he’d say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing . . . . That he cares . . . That is all. Nothing else.
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.
Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.
Prayer was never meant to be magic,’ Mother said.’Then why bother with it?’ Suzy scowled.’Because it’s an act of love,’ Mother said.
If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.
Lords of melody and song,Lords of roses burning bright,Blue will right the ancient wrong,Though the way is dark and long,Blue will shine with loving light.
We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.
There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.
… Papa’s always had the ability to remember the good things and let the bad ones go.” “Not a bad ability.””… I’m not sure. I think we have to remember it all before we can forgive it.
This wasn’t the first time that I’d come close to death, but it was the first time I’d been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you’ve loved.
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.
Goodbyes are not easy, but I’m ready to move on. I’m not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don’t have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.
It is … through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.
Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure…
Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.
Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.
Women in Jesus’ day were less than second-class citizens.
A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.
You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.
I hate it!” Charles Wallace cried passionately. “I hate the Dark Thing!
We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.
Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.
Why does anybody do anything?” Mimi asked impatiently. “Most of the time we don’t know–any of us.
We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.
Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.-Aunt Beast
Meg’s eyes were too bright. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.
Hate is like cancer, separate from the normal cells, devouring and not being nourished, annihilating itself along with everything it attacks.
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.
Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.
we’re all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can’t tell which is which
A book, too, can be a star ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.
Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.
One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.
I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.
Maybe that’s the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.
Because to take away a man’s freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
They’ve never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was so bad that I could have made better time with a horse.
It was a star,” Mrs. Whatsit said sadly. “A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won, oh, yes, my children, it won. But it lost its life in the winning.
For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.
As long as we know what it’s about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.
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.
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 great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
Thinking I’m a moron gives people something to feel smug about,” Charles Wallace said. “Why should I disillusion them?
Lords of space and Lords of time,Lords of blessing, Lords of grace,Who is in the warmer clime?Who will follow Madoc’s rhyme?Blue will alter time and space.
We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.
I would, quite often, like to be grownup, wise, and sophisticated. But these gifts are not mine.
Being alive hurts. I have found it best not to rush for the aspirin bottle. – A Severed Wasp
My dear, I’m seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business…
All will be redeemed in God’s fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.
Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.
Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love. That’s how it works best.
Lords of blue and Lords of gold,Lords of wind and waters wild,Lords of time that’s growing old,When will come the season mild?When will come blue Madoc’s child?
We all tend to make zealous judgement, and thereby close ourselves off from revelation.
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.
But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.
We cannot always cry at the right timeand who is to say which time is right?
Some of these questions don’t have finite answers, but the questions themselves are important. Don’t stop asking, and don’t let anybody tell you the questions aren’t worth it. They are.
Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.
When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.
but BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time.
There’s no such thing as an unbreakable scientific rule, because, sooner or later, they all seem to get broken. Or to change.
There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.
Because you’re not what I would have you be I blind myself to who in truth you are.
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.
Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.
When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.