Ilsa

by Madeleine L'Engle

I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole.

wow

I have a pitcher into which the people I love have poured themselves. I have accepted everything and been allowed to give nothing.

L’Engle ice-skating in Brittany, France, circa 1926.