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" Sometimes I think that we have forgotten how to be truly happy, we are so conditioned to look for instant gratification. Thus we confuse happiness with transitory pleasures, with self-indulgence. How, in fact, can we live happily when we are surrounded on all sides by so much pain and misery? War and alarums of war, earthquake, flood, drought. Crime is rising; anger and frustration burst into violence, and violence itself becomes a perverse form of gratification. What is this blessedness, this promised happiness? What, if we follow the directions given us in the Beatitudes, is expected of us?—not a general ‘us,’ but each one of us in all our particularity. "

Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention


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Madeleine L'Engle quote : Sometimes I think that we have forgotten how to be truly happy, we are so conditioned to look for instant gratification. Thus we confuse happiness with transitory pleasures, with self-indulgence. How, in fact, can we live happily when we are surrounded on all sides by so much pain and misery? War and alarums of war, earthquake, flood, drought. Crime is rising; anger and frustration burst into violence, and violence itself becomes a perverse form of gratification. What is this blessedness, this promised happiness? What, if we follow the directions given us in the Beatitudes, is expected of us?—not a general ‘us,’ but each one of us in all our particularity.