Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“Our life is like a land journey, too even and easy and dull over long distances across the plains, too hard and painful up the steep grades; but, on the summits of the mountain, you have a magnificent view--and feel exalted--and your eyes are full of happy tears--and you want to sing--and wish you had wings! And then--you can't stay there, but must continue your journey--you begin climbing down the other side, so busy with your footholds that your summit experience is forgotten.”
― Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe

“No, dear, but speaking of Father reminded me how much I miss him, how much I owe him, and how faithfully I should watch and work to keep his little daughters safe and good for him.

Yet you told him to go, Mother, and didn’t cry when he went, and never complain now, or seem as if you needed any help, said Jo, wondering.

I gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone. Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty and will surely be the happier for it in the end? If I don’t seem to need help, it is because I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but my become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Your father, Jo. He never loses patience,--never doubts or complains,--but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully, that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and showed me that I must try to practise all the virtues I would have my little girls possess, for I was their example. It was easier for your sakes than for my own; a startled or surprised look from one of you, when I spoke sharply, rebuked me more than any words could have done; and the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Life, with its 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

“The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'...I am grateful that Jesus cried out those words, because it means that I need never fear to cry them out myself. I need never fear, nor feel any sense of guilt, during the inevitable moments of forsakenness. They come to us all. They are part of the soul's growth.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“What I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers--ugly. No! I don't want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“There is nothing that I, personally, can do, except be there. At my family's suggestion I begin taking my little six-pound electronic typewriter with me so that I can write while Hugh is napping. This helps. For, like most of us, I feel frustrated when a situation arises where I am totally helpless, where there is nothing I can do to make anything better. I can, I hope, help Hugh a little by my presence, by the touch of my hand. But there is nothing specifically for me to do. And I think of a friend who has a coffee mug with the inscription: DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING. STAND THERE.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“But if Hugh dies first, would I ever be able to stop saying, "we" and say "I"? I doubt it. I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are "we" and "us," a new creature born of the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive "we" remains. And most growth has come during times of trial.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“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

“The peculiar idea that bigger is better has been around for at least as long as I have, and it's always bothered me. There is within it the implication that it is more difficult for God to care about a gnat than about a galaxy. Creation is just as visible in a grain of sand as in a skyful of stars.

The church is not immune from the bigger-is-better heresy. One woman told of going to a meeting where only a handful of people turned out, and these faithful few were scolded by the visiting preacher for the sparseness of the congregation. And she said indignantly, 'Our Lord said *feed* my sheep, not count them!' I often feel that I'm being counted, rather than fed, and so I am hungry.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season

“Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would NOT make everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of the master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God's ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religious
order. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young people
into an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children
receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun,
for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as
never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or
what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.
This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid
by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

“To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as your were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

“We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

“She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers. (kindle location 2950)”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child