Quotes from Monica Furlong

People are like a pack of dogs sometimes. All right one by one, but together... together they do awful things they don't mean to do.

What is difficult about learning - any kind of learning - is that you have to give up what you know already to make room for the new ideas. Children are much better at it than grownups.

resisting life, he finds that the Self is more than his own being; it includes the whole universe.

All learned people learn Latin. It's bound to come in useful. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are about real life.

People are like a pack of dogs sometimes. All right one by one, but together... together they do awful things they don't mean to do.

Wise Child: Why don't you beat me then? Juniper: I can't be bothered.

All this I told Juniper, and she listened in the quiet, dispassionate way she had when you told her something truly terrible. It was as if she was joining things together in her mind, making some act of love and healing where otherwise all was violence and despair.

Perhaps you will tell us now what a Doran is." "it is someone who loves all the creatures of the world, the animals, birds, plants, trees, and people, and who cannot bear to do any of them harm. It is someone who believes that they are all linked together and that therefore everything can be used to heal the pain and suffering of the world. It is someone who does not hate anybody and who is not frightened of anyone or anything.

What is difficult about learning - any kind of learning - is that you have to give up what you know already to make room for the new ideas. Children are much better at it than grownups.

You always feel someone must be to blame when you are cold or miserable or frightened…It may not be so at all – it is just the weather of life – but even if they are to blame…does it matter?

The journey inward is what gives meaning to the life outside ourselves. Not in any static, dogmatic, once-for-all way either, but in a way that grows and develops and changes to meet different circumstances, different stages of development. Contemplation is not an optional extra -- it is, as much as action, part of the very stuff of being human." 

The human problem, as Watts sees it, is the attempt to gain control of the "streaming," a habitual tension that sets up a chronic frustration, the belief that force or effort or will can solve our difficulties.

Here you will never learn anything just because girls do it. But it's a pity not to do things just because girls do them. Work must be done for its own sake.

To begin with she taught me how to tease wool, the process of preparing it for spinning. I learned to pull the wool off the fleece, take out the dirty and tangled bits, part the wool between my fingers until it was of even texture, and then comb it into delicate little rolls. "It's the preparation that counts in spinning," Anghard said. "If you are lazy about that you will never spin an even thread."... ..."Wool is a living thing," she said once.