Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.
Interpretation
Stories enhance our humanity and character.
In this quote, Madeleine L'Engle emphasizes the profound impact stories have on our lives. They not only enrich our existence but also cultivate essential human qualities like courage and love, making us more connected and empathetic individuals. Through narratives, we discover deeper truths about ourselves and the world around us.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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.
How good life is when one does something good and just!
Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.
We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
One of the best things about life—a reason not to go blindly after one goal and one goal only—is that sometimes it will take you to something that is way cooler than anything you would have consciously set out to do in the first place.
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.