If we begin with certainties, we will end in doubt. But if we begin with doubts and bear them patiently, we may end in certainty.
Francis Bacon's De Augmentis
It is not easy for me to be a Christian, to believe all that I want to believe. I stray, and then my stories pull me back if I listen to them carefully. I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.
Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art
Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art
The
truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly
you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages
fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might
think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out
of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake. Love is
something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with
someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient and kind, love
is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the
darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.
Tumblr User 1112pm
How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.
Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.
Franz Kafka
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C.S. Lewis's "On Three Ways of Writing for Children"
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
...in every particular I fail Strunk's Elements of Style or any other manual of 'good writing'. If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it.
-Stephen Fry's The Fry Chronicles
There is darkness on the water.
There is darkness on the land.
There is darkness all around us,
but I will take your hand.
I will sing to you of morning.
I will stay until it's light.
I will sing to you of laughter
on the other side of night.
-Ann E. Burg's All the Broken Pieces
I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think, and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorites. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "Well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore.
-Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
Set not thy heart on any good or gain,
Life means but pleasure,
or means but pain;
when Time lets slip a little perfect hour,
O take it--for it will not come again.
-Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
-St. Augustine
My life has been shaped before me--shaped for me by something--someone who has seen my actions before I even see a reason for them.
-Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddle-Master of Hed
