Madeleine L'Engle · 288 pages
Rating: (8.5K votes)
“You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“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, and you’re stuck with it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“Rules are made for people, not people for rules,”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“If you accept any position of authority you have to know when to break or circumvent a rule. It’s the knowing when that’s important.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“There always have been and there always will be people who have been corrupted into enjoying any excuse for cruelty.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“I can’t do it for love of God, like Tom Tallis, or for heaven’s sake, as Mr. Frost said. But because I love people I have to act according to it—to the fact that I love them.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“There’s something wrong about trying to heal with a surgeon’s knife.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from The Arm of the Starfish
“That’s wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn’t ever talk about whether people like you, that’s bad taste.”
― Shirley Jackson, quote from The Lottery and Other Stories
“The guardians with their stern faces had no creative power. But they had strength and cunning, and they had found a way to steal and harness other people's powers for their own needs. They were forcing the children to describe the future they wanted, not the one that could be.”
― Lois Lowry, quote from Gathering Blue
“I am lying in the same bed where my mother died so long ago; on the same mattress,
beneath the same black wool coverlet she wrapped us in to sleep. I slept beside her, her
little girl, in the special place she made for me in her arms.
I think I can still feel the calm rhythm of her breathing; the palpitations and sighs that
soothed my sleep. . . . I think I feel the pain of her death. . . . But that isn't true.
Here I lie, flat on my back, hoping to forget my loneliness by remembering those times.
Because I am not here just for a while. And I am not in my mother's bed but in a black box
like the ones for burying the dead. Because I am dead.
I sense where I am, but I can think. . .”
― Juan Rulfo, quote from Pedro Páramo
“You were the sun, and I was crashing into you.”
― Rainbow Rowell, quote from Carry On
“The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of friendship between them.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Haroun and the Sea of Stories
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