Great Throughts Treasury

"How do we teach a child ? our own, or those in a classroom ? to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have ? or need ? answers."

"How long your closet held a whiff of you, long after hangers hung austere and bare. I would walk in and suddenly the true sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air and life was in that small still living breath. Where are you? Since so much of you is here, your unique odor quite ignoring death. My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear and vital in my longing empty arms. But other clothes fill up the space, your space, and scent on scent send out strange false alarms. Not of your odor there is not a trace. But something unexpected still breaks through the goneness to the presentness of you."

"Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else."

"I also read quite lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about."

"I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know."

"I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their different drum: Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?"

"I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything."

"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and ?be? fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."

"I believe that consistently we need to look for good, and not for evil, that when we look for evil we call up evil, while heaven comes closer when we acknowledge it."

"I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.""

"I believe that we all have this dark underestimation of ourselves. Sometimes it is masked as arrogance, overestimation, superiority, but underneath the brashness the problem is insecurity and only unqualified, unmerited, unconditional love can assuage it."

"I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love."

"I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group... If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed. Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth."

"I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as written by Dostoyevsky and heavily edited by John Updike."

"I didn't mean to tell you, Mrs. Whatsit faltered. I didn't mean ever to let you know. But oh, my dears, I did so love being a star! Yyouu are sstill verry yyoungg, Mrs Witch said, her voice faintly chiding. The Medium sat looking happily at the star-filled sky in her ball, smiling, and nodding and chuckling gently. But Meg noticed that her eyes were drooping, and suddenly her head fell forward and she gave a faint snore. Poor thing, Mrs Whatsit said, we've worn her out. It's very hard work for her."

"I do not know everything; still many things I understand."

"I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive... and open to growth."

"I don?t know what I?m like. I get glimpses of myself in other people?s eyes. I try to be careful whom I use as a mirror; my husband, my children, my mother But we aren?t always careful of our mirrors. I?m not. I made the mistake of thinking that I ought not to write because I wasn?t making money, and therefore in the eyes of many people around me I had no business to spend hours every day at the typewriter."

"I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are."

"I don't like writing two books of the same genre in a row."

"I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be."

"I endeavor to hold the ?I? as one only for the cloud of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed to be responsible. Its light against my face reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place"

"I feel as though I'm not breathing when I'm out of his presence. He's the oxygen in my air, the sun in my universe, the staff of my life."

"I felt somewhat the same sense of irrationality in the world around me? Whenever this occurs I turn to the piano, to my typewriter, to a book. We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what? will not burn."

"I found myself earnestly explaining to the young minister that I did not believe in God, 'but I've discovered that I can't live as though I didn't believe in him. As long as I don't need to say any more than that I try to live as though I believe in God, I would very much like to come to church--if you'll let me."

"I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?"

"I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour ? write, write, write."

"I have never lived before... Until this summer, I did not know what it was to be alive."

"I heard a man of brilliance cry out that God has withdrawn from nations when they have turned from Him, and surely we are a stiff-necked people; why should He not withdraw? But then I remember Jonah accusing God of over-lenience, of foolishness, mercy, and compassion. We desperately need the foolishness of God."

"I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it."

"I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect."

"I look at many of the brilliant, sophisticated intellectuals of my generation, struggling through psychoanalysis, balancing sleeping pills with waking pills, teetering on the thin edge of despair, and think that perhaps they have not found the answer after all."

"I look at Mother, and think that if I am to reflect on the eventual death of her body, of all bodies, in a way that is not destructive, I must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final, physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom: the death of self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices which, instead of making us more fully alive, make us less."

"I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take."

"I love the small group of women with whom I meet weekly to discuss whatever book we have chosen and what it means in our lives... We do not try to coerce each other, even when we disagree. We try to listen to each other... Therefore, this group is for me another icon, and one that helps me to keep my eyes and ears open, and my mind ready to move and grow in understanding."

"I really do understand that people change, as Wolfi said, not so much from who we are as to who we are."

"I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can."

"I remember I turned on the light and stood in front of the mirror, looking at myself, frightened because people thought when they were getting ready for bed, and didn't think about me because I wasn't the most important thing in their lives at all. Mother and Father'd always made me feel that I was important, and now all of a sudden I realized I wasn't. How can you be important when nobody knows about you? It very frightening to realize you aren't important after all."

"I saw Eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light, all calm, as it was bright, and round beneath it, time, in hours, days, years, driven by the spheres, like a vast shadow moved, in which the world and all her train were hurled."

"I simply take him into my heart, and then put him into God's hand."

"I sometimes think God is a s--t ? and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s--t."

"I suppose its arrogance or selfishness or something to care so much about being loved that I could feel that no one loved me. It was only with Andrew in all the world that I knew I was loved, that I was worth loving. Not because of me, Charlotte, but because I was his mother. Not because I was a good mother but because simply, biologically, I was his. No matter what I was like, no matter how much I was lacking, I was still his mother, there was this basic, primary fact that was there and that nothing could ever change, not anything I did or didn't do. So I believed that he loved me. And so I was--I was freed. With everybody else in the world I haven't believed it, and so I haven't been free. She had never put this into words before; it hurt to hear it, but it was true; it was Charlotte. And if anybody is for a moment gentle with me, then I am--I can't explain, I dissolve, I'm completely undone."

"I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what."

"I think we're supposed to ask too much of each other; otherwise, nothing would ever get done."

"I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished."

"I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable perspective."

"I was at the annual meeting of a state library association a few years later, when the children were in the process of leaving the nest, and one of the librarians asked me, What do you think you and Hugh have done which was the best for your children? I answered immediately and without thinking, We love each other."

"I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously--to be, in fact, a true adult."

"I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly."

"I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. I don't need to know the difference between a children's book and an adult one; it's the questions that have come from thinking about it that are important. I wish we'd stop finding answers for everything. One of the reasons my generation has mucked up the world to such an extent is our loss of the sense of the mysterious."