Great Throughts Treasury

"I would venture a guess that an artist concentrating wholly un-self-consciously, wholly thrown into his work, is incapable of producing pornography."

"I would, quite often, like to be grownup, wise, and sophisticated. But these gifts are not mine."

"I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death ? that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing.""

"I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn?t get along together, and what made people tick. That?s why I started to write stories."

"I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if I'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise."

"If a book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

"If I didn't get fond I could be happy all the time."

"If I have something that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children."

"If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing. I'm glad I made this decision in a moment of failure. It's easy to say you're a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, the ?in? is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all."

"If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns."

"If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said, by me. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try."

"If I try self-consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals"

"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."

"If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject."

"If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words."

"If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive. If a friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it should be cut out, and quickly."

"If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends"

"If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love."

"If the work comes to the artist and says, 'Here I am, serve me,' then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, 'Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."

"If thou could'st empty all thyself of self like to a shell dishabited then might he find thee on the ocean shelf and say this is not dead and fill thee with himself instead. But thou art all replete with very thou and hast such shrewd activity that when he comes he says this is enow unto itself - 'twere better let it be it is so small and full there is no room for me."

"If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us."

"If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be."

"If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure."

"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."

"If we aren't capable of being hurt we aren't capable of feeling joy."

"If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester."

"If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy."

"If you want to see the stars you must go out into the country where there are no lights to dim them. But if you really want to see the stars then you must be out in the middle of the ocean. Then you can see them as the sailors and navigators saw them in the days when stars were known as very few people know them now."

"If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody."

"If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down."

"I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being."

"In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own."

"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."

"In Egypt, I learned why the women drew black lines of kohl around their eyes: to produce shadow, to protect their eyes from the fierceness of the sun. We see because of the sun, but if there were no shadows that light would quickly blind us. We need the shadows of buildings to protect us at least a little from heat."

"In my dreams, I never have an age."

"In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points."

"In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader know each other; they meet on the bridge of words."

"In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality."

"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."

"In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately."

"In true love, the lover's pleasure comes in giving himself wholly to the loved one. When we try to give ourselves to ourselves, that is not only perversion, it is ultimately suicide."

"In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet?There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That?s a very strict rhythm or meter?And each line has to end with a rigid pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet?But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants?You?re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

"Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might."

"Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others."

"Intimacy between friends involves a non-dominant love, as well as vulnerability. With a true friend we can share the deepest places of our hearts, the dark as well as the light. I have friends whose secrets will go to the grave with me, as mine with them. We listen, we share, we laugh, we accept. We seldom give advice, and when we do it is for love, not power. We play together, and this is a special delight for me in my mid-seventies, to have friends with whom I can play with the enthusiasm and whole-heartedness of a child."

"It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have."

"It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists."

"It has only recently struck me that we need our shadow-casters, metaphorically as well as physically. What in me casts shadows, and what kind?"

"It is... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth."

"It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two."