Sunday, November 08, 2015
Quotable: The Souls which would Perish
"... nothing is the way I thought it was. I went to war thinking of myself as Galahad, out to free fellow human beings from the intolerable bondage of slavery. But it wasn't as simple as that. There were other, less pure issues being fought over, with little concern for the souls which would perish for nothing more grand than political greed, corruption, and conniving for power ... I saw a man with his face blown off and no mouth to scream with, and yet he screamed and could not die. I saw two brothers, and one was in blue and one was in grey, and I will not tell you which one took his saber and ran it through the other. Oh God, it was brother against brother, Cain and Abel all over again. And I was turned into Cain. What would God have to do with a nation where brothers can turn against each other with such brutality?"
"... there were many nights during the war when God withdrew from our battlefields. When the sons of men fight against each other in hardness of heart, why should God not withdraw? Slavery is evil, God knows, but war is evil, too, evil, evil."
-Character of Bran Maddox in A Swiftly Tilting Planet
(Crosswicks, 1978) by Madeleine L'Engle, p. 243.
"... there were many nights during the war when God withdrew from our battlefields. When the sons of men fight against each other in hardness of heart, why should God not withdraw? Slavery is evil, God knows, but war is evil, too, evil, evil."
-Character of Bran Maddox, p. 247.
Labels: art and literature, Madeleine L'Engle, quotations, War
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Reality, Temptation, & Nothing
Not everybody is able to see me ... I'm real and most earthlings can bear very little reality.
The temptation ... is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe ... nothing created is the center.
When everything is nothing there will be no more war, no illness, no death. There will be no more poverty, no more pain, no more slums, no more starvation ...
-Character of Proginoskes in A Wind in the Door (Crosswicks, 1973) by Madeleine L'Engle, p. 81.
The temptation ... is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe ... nothing created is the center.
-Character of Proginoskes, p. 178.
When everything is nothing there will be no more war, no illness, no death. There will be no more poverty, no more pain, no more slums, no more starvation ...
-Character of Echthros-Mr. Jenkins in A Wind in the Door, p. 187.
Labels: art and literature, Madeleine L'Engle, philosophy, psychology, quotations, religion
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Quotable: Freedom, Evil, & Utopia
... to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.
Source: Character of Canon Tom Tallis in Madeleine L'Engle's The Young Unicorns (Macmillan, 2008), p. 202.
... when evil declares itself in its absolute form, it declares itself as an angel of light.
Source: Tallis, p. 237.
... Utopia ... is always a heresy, no matter how nobly conceived.
Source: Tallis, p. 241.
Labels: art and literature, Christianity, freedom, Madeleine L'Engle, philosophy, quotations
