"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."

-- Madeleine L'Engle

#Book Quotes #Light Quotes #Illumination Quotes

“Everybody thinks that I did this and I did that, but I just went along with the times.”
“Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.”
“In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.”
“I wouldn't call myself a coward, no way. But being buried alive is something I could never handle. The only way you'd see me being buried alive is if I was dead, man.”
“Did you eat a lot of paint chips when you were a kid?”
“And it's the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy.”
“Some sacrifices are sound; the rest are mine”
“The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universeâ€™s history.”

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