Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist
The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes, 1979)
Source: Kindred Spirits
Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist
The Drama of the Gifted Child (Das Drama des begabten Kindes, 1979)
Kate DiCamillo book Flora & Ulysses
Source: Flora & Ulysses (2013), Chapter Four: A Surprisingly Helpful Cynic, p. 12
“A mother knows what her child's gone through, even if she didn't see it herself.”
Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925–2006) Indonesian writer
Source: Gadis Pantai
J.M. Coetzee book Life & Times of Michael K
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
Context: He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end.
Elizabeth Noble (1968) British novelist
Source: Things I Want My Daughters to Know
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
Section 4.21 <!-- p. 244 - 245 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. 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. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.