You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling? A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn.

the discoveries don't come when you're looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control.

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

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.

I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it.

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

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

Women must be very gentle with men as they, as well as women, seek to regain the lost wholeness for which they were destined.

We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast

The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

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.

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

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.

That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.

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.

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.

She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.

If I'm not free to fail, I'm not free to take risks and everything in life that's worth doing involves a willingness to take a risk.

If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive.

Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.

Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.

I looked at this tiny, perfect creature and it was as though a light switch had been turned on. A great rush of love flooded out of me.

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

Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved.

To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.

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.

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

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.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

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.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth

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