The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.
Interpretation
Love is a journey filled with ups and downs, not a simple path.
Madeleine L'Engle's quote highlights the complexity of love, suggesting that it is not a straightforward experience but rather one characterized by fluctuations in emotions and circumstances. Just as a landscape has hills and valleys, so too does love present challenges and triumphs, making the experience rich and multifaceted.
In practice
This quote can be used in a wedding speech to emphasize the journey of love.
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
When we believe in the impossible, it becomes possible, and we can do all kinds of extraordinary things.
People are surprised by the poverty and think that I wasn't cared for. But that wasn't the case - I was deeply loved.
To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
I frequently observe that one pretty face would be followed by five and thirty frights.
I have pursued her, as love hath pursued me
I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.