Great Throughts Treasury

"Believing takes practice."

"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."

"But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."

"But I did feel, and passionately, that it wasn't fair of God to give us brains enough to ask the ultimate questions if he didn't intend to teach us the answers."

"But if I knew everything, there would be no wonder, because what I believe in is far more than I know."

"But I'm not patient! cried Meg passionately. I've never been patient!"

"But my memories are like a fire in winter?whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them."

"But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own."

"But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years."

"But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career."

"But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive."

"But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential."

"But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?"

"But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."

"Calvin said, ?Do you know that this is the first time I've seen you without your glasses? I'm blind as a bat without them. I'm near-sighted, like father. Well, you know what, you've got dream-boat eyes, Calvin said. Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.?"

"Carrying my babies was a marvelous mystery, lives growing unseen except by the slow swelling of my belly. Death is an even greater mystery... The God I cry out to in anguish or joy can neither be proved nor disapproved. The hope I have that death is not the end of all our questions can neither be proved nor disproved."

"Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel,Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before whichMoses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake."

"Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general."

"Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known."

"Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust."

"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."

"Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm."

"Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived."

"Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence."

"Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means."

"Experiment is the mother of knowledge."

"Far too often today children are taught, both in school and at home, to equate truth with fact. If we can?t understand something and dissect it with our conscious minds, then it isn?t true. In our anxiety to limit ourselves to that which we can comprehend definitively, we are losing all that is above, beyond, below, through, past, over that small area encompassed by our conscious minds."

"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."

"For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground."

"Friends do everything they can to protect each other."

"Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding."

"George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his."

"Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality."

"God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty."

"God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent."

"God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are."

"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. - David"

"Grandfather looked away from me and out to sea, and when he spoke, it was as though he spoke to himself. The obligations of normal human kindness ? chesed, as the Hebrew has it ? that we all owe. But there?s a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There?s a kind of vanity in goodness. I could hardly believe my ears. But aren?t we supposed to be good? I?m not sure. Grandfather?s voice was heavy. I do know that we?re not good, and there?s a lot of truth to the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses' vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way."

"Growing up is a process that never ends. It isn't a point you attain so you can say, Hooray, I'm grown up. Some people never grow up. And nobody ever finishes growing. Or shouldn't. If you stop you might as well quit. What I have to tell you is that it never gets any easier. It goes right on being rough forever. But nothing that's easy is worth anything. You ought to have learned that by now. What happens as you keep on growing is that all of a sudden you realize that it's more exciting and beautiful than scary and awful."

"Half the problem is that an identity is something which must be understood intuitively, rather than in terms of provable fact. An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."

"Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate."

"Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?"

"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."

"HENNEBERGER: If the Bible is not literally true, does that mean we don?t need to take it seriously? L'ENGLE: Oh no, you do, because it?s truth, not fact, and you have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts."

"Her hands were broad and strong; the true pianist's sledgehammer hands, they had been called. They still moved to her bidding?. No matter to what she likened them-turnips, carrots-they were still as nimble as ever. The notes came clear and true."

"Here we are living in a world of "identity crises," and most of us have no idea what an identity is."

"Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds. And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other. That was surely the purest kind of thing. Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words."

"Holiness... is nothing we can ?do?... It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received. We do not have to be qualified to be holy. We do not have to be qualified to be whole, or healed."

"How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I 'believe' for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well."