In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say...
You describe your Wonderful Night very well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His...
I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?
What "inspires" my books? Really I don't know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn't say.
By the way I also would say "I got a book." But your teacher and I are not "English teachers" in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English language ought to be: I'm concerned entirely with what it and however it came to be wha...
You know, my dear, it's only doing you harm to write . After you have been writing strict, rhyming verse for about 10 years it will be time to venture on the free sort. At present it only encourages you to write prose not so good as your ordinary pro...
Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch ...
To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and ins...
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ
This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know abou...
A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave
I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.
We had better share our bewilderments. By hiding them from each other we should not hide them from ourselves.
Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
If we are free to delete all inconvenient data we shall certainly have no theological difficulties; but for the same reason no solutions and no progress.... The troublesome fact, the apparent absurdity which can't be fitted into any synthesis we have...
I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
To think of our prayers as just ‘causes’ would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life as a whole, the ‘being taken into account,’ or ‘conside...
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
