"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."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet)

"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."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"In reading we must become creators."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"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."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder: Essays)

"April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tenden, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder: Essays)

"But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them.... Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze.... Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
— Barbara Kingsolver

"'Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?'
I shook my head. 'No, but I've watched. I know what you mean.' The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
'The seat of human emotion should be the liver,' Doc Homer said. 'That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.'
I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter."
— Anita Diamant (The Red Tent)

"I wanted to cry, but I realized that I was too old for that. I would be a woman soon and I would have to learn how to live with a divided heart."
— Anita Diamant (The Red Tent)

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
— Anne Lamott

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past."
— Anne Lamott

"You can either practice being right or practice being kind."
— Anne Lamott

"I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us."
— Anne Lamott

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life."
— Anne Lamott (Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

"And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore."
— Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation."
— Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"'I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced."
— Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)

"Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back."
— Anne Lamott

"My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable"
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank you.""
— Anne Lamott

"Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there."
— Anne Lamott

"...by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier."
— Anne Lamott

"...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."
— Anne Lamott

"Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned."
— Anne Lamott

"...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself..."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

""Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.""
— Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts)

"You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic."
— Donald Miller