“… The writer and the worshipper both draw from one source, the source where sound becomes melody, and melody turns into language, which becomes offering. Both are as open as an open wound. Both live tense and privileged moments. If one may assume that man could not live without literature, which is not so sure, one may equally affirm that neither could he survive without prayer.”
- Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), in 2003 interview with Krista Tippett - you can read / listen here
"Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer."
"...Yet mental images play an important part in my prayers....
But they seem to help me most when they are most fugitive
and fragmentary—rising and bursting like bubbles in champagne or
wheeling like rooks in a windy sky: contradicting one another (in logic) as the
crowded metaphors of a swift poet may do.
Fix on any one, and it goes dead.
You must do as Blake would do with a joy; kiss it as it flies...."
- from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, page 86, by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
