Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
How do we teach a child--our own, or those in a classroom--to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fa...
Two people whose opinion I respect told me that the word Christian would turn people off. This certainly says something about the state of Christianity today. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were...
The foolish of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of god is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that may not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble,...
I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.
In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but becaus...
I have been wondering this summer why our love has seemed deeper, tenderer than ever before. It's taken us twenty-five years, almost, but perhaps at last we are willing to let each other be; as we are...
Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.
The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the di...
The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do hav...
We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair...
When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.
There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.
If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of...
Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.
We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the ve...
Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a candle to see by.We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up int...
Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him i...