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.

Somehow or other, the loving parents had swallowed one of the Tempter’s hooks, and the child was given total self-indulgence, which is far from free will. He still tempts. The ancient, primordial battle to destroy Community, to shatter Trinity, still continues. Creation still groans with the pain of it. Like it or not, we’re caught in the middle.

There always have been and there always will be people who have been corrupted into enjoying any excuse for cruelty.

Her father said, “You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.” “Even at a time like this?” Meg asked. The call from Calvin, the sound of her husband’s voice, had nearly broken her control. “Especially at a time like this,” her mother said gently.

Oh, my darling you are not dumb,” her father answered. “You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.

But I have to accept the fact that I am often unwise; that I am not always loving; that I make mistakes; that I am, in fact, human. And as Christians we are not meant to be less human than other people, but more human, just as Jesus of Nazareth was more human.

We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.

There’re a lot of things you don’t understand.” Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. “I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn’t seem worth it. It wasn’t you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma’s death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it.

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.

Oh, Meg, you are a moron,” Calvin said. “Don’t you know you’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me in a long time?