"If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Life, with it's rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit"
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"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."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage)

"Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

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

"We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"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."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing."
— C.S. Lewis

"Aim for heaven and you will get earth thrown in.
Aim at earth and you will get neither. "
— C.S. Lewis

"All we have is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver."
— Anthony Trollope (Can You Forgive Her?)

"A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. "
— Anthony Trollope

"But she knew this,—that it was necessary for her happiness that she should devote herself to some one. All the elegancies and outward charms of life were delightful, if only they could be used as the means to some end. As an end themselves they were nothing. "
— Anthony Trollope (Phineas Redux)

"If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
— C.S. Lewis

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage)

"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

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Many Waters)

"Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Believing takes practice."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"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

"God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens."
— Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)

"On the other side of pain, there is still love."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort."
— Dorothy Dunnett