Quotes about Life

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.

It was a star, Mrs. Whatsit said sadly. A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won, oh, yes, my children, it won. But it lost its life in the winning.

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.

Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves....

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business...

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 and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

If we knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we'd tend not to notice the sunrise,or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love.

Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. 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.

When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.

Lords of fire and earth and water, Lords of moon and wind and sky, Come now to the Old Man's daughter, Come from fathers long gone by. Bring blue from a distance eye. Lords of water, earth, and fire, Lords of wind and snow and rain, Give to my heart's desire. Life as all life comes with pain, But blue will come to us again.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation

Active happiness is not a common state. Active unhappiness is better than dull days. Katherine was seldom in an intermediate stage.