28 quotes
In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Nothing important is completely explicable.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
"Why do you write for children?" My immediate response to this question is, "I don't."
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)