Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Lloyd Jones

New Zealand Author

"Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed."

"I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories likes these. It feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things down, so we can move on."

"A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me."

"We have all lost our possessions and many of us our homes," he said. "But these losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is our minds and our imaginations."

"Quiet had a roof and it had walls around it, and you could sit inside it. She had never thought of silence as a place.One of the friends, Tom Williams told her,'the place is in your heart, Louise. Everything else is just clutter."

"Here At The End Of The World We Learn To Dance"

"I had discovered that the plainest house can crown a fantasy or daydream. An open window can be tolerated. So can an open door. But I discovered the value of four walls and a roof. Something about containment that at the same time offers escape."

"Dreams are nervy things—all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die. "

"A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames."

"Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don’t. but when you do need it you better be practiced at having faith, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren’t practicing enough. That’s what prayers are for—practice, children. Practice."

"Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves."

"Some areas of life are not meant to overlap."

"Dreams are private, she said. And she is right. A dream is a story that no one else will get to hear or read."

"Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars."

"“Let’s all do it,” said Mr. Watts. “Close your eyes and silently recite your name.” The sound of my name took me to a place deep inside my head. I already knew that words could take you into a new world, but I didn’t know that on the strength of one word spoken for my ears only I would find myself in a room that no one else knew about. “Another thing,” Mr. Watts said. “No one in the history of your short lives has used the same voice as you with which to say your name. This is yours. Your special gift that no one can ever take from you.” "

"Let there be a fresh breeze of new honesty, new idealism, new integrity. You have typewriters, presses and a huge audience. How about raising hell?"

"Prayer is the best test of an individual, and it is also the best test of a church. A church can be flourishing: She can be successful in terms of organizations, she can be tremendously active and appear to be prosperous, but if you want to know whether she is a real church or not, examine the amount of prayer that takes place. "

"The greatest tragedy in the world is a divided church. We must come together. So don't start talking about doctrine, because if you do, we shall be divided. But there is one thing we can do. We may not be able to agree about doctrine, but we can always pray together. "