Anne Hamilton > Anne's Quotes

“...to limit the meaning of Aslan simply to lion from Turkish is to miss its deep northern resonances and the song of the snowflakes whirling around it. Lewis admitted that, as a boy, he had been ‘crazed by northern–ness’ and there are many subtle references to Norse mythology in the story.
In fact, if we treat Aslan as a word from Old Norse, it simply means god of the land. By combining that meaning with Turkish lion, it is essentially cognate which Welsh, Llew, lion, the very word from which the name Lewis is derived.”
― Anne Hamilton

“To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give Him glory, too. God is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

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

“The Piper's playing again, and there's a full orchestra.'

There was a long silence as Andrew deciphered the cryptic statement. 'A FULL orchestra?”
― D.J. Stutley

“We fought back with our music; it was the only weapon we had.”
― Michael Morpurgo

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“To make a lacy texture of holes and fills, turn around and purl. Pearl is also a kind of colour. Colours are all the colours of the rainbow and the colours between the rainbow colours between. I can never get indigo. Year after year, I wait for indigo, but even when the fashion is navy, you never get indigo, the glow, the long slow glow of indigo in the high night sky.”
― Anne Bartlett

“She turned back to inspect a bank of greens: olive, jade, leaf, kiwi, lime, a silver-green like the back of birch leaves, a bright pistachio.”
― Anne Bartlett, Knitting

“And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history.

Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.”
― Anne Bartlett, Knitting

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume 5, 1709–1713

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Many have exchanged the touch of God for the applause of men”
― John Paul Warren

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.”
― Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron

“In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.”
― John Grisham

“A willingness to lose one's self in a story was the first step to learning compassion, to appreciating other cultures, to realizing what possibilities the world held for people who kept at life despite the odds.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“Adventure is just bad planning.”
― Roald Amundsen