Indentification

From Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention:

"Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread."
(from a poem by Conrad Aiken; Madeleine's husband proposed to her using these lines.)

"I read somewhere that one appreciates happiness only when one is afraid of losing it. But in the world today one has to accept that fear as a kind of guest in the house and it makes the moments when it is pushed into the background more intense and more wonderful. And what one has had, as long as there is life and reason in one's body, can never be taken away."

"I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when the good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present."

"From an Icelandic saga: 'Every fate is to be overcome by bearing it.' The struggle to be writer, wife, mother, human being, was one I shared with many women. Even if it was not saga-like, it was mine."

"My friend Dana and I talk about how we want to make everything all right for those we love, and cannot... We say to each other that if we were God we would make everything all right, and then we stop. Look at each other. Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would notmake everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of teh master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God's ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.

But we do have to know in the very depths of our being that the ultimate end of the story, no matter how many aeons it takes, is going to be all right."