Madeleine L'Engle on Creativity

From Madeleine L'Engle's book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art . .

Finley Eversole, in The Politics of Creativity, writes,

In our society, at the age of five, 90 percent of the population measures "high creativity." By the age of seven, the figure has dropped to 10 percent. And the percentage of adults with high creativity is only two percent! Our creativity is destroyed not through the use of outside force, but through criticism, innuendo,

by the dirty devices of this world. So we are diminished, and we forget that we are more than we know. The child is aware of unlimited potential, and this munificence is one of the joys of creativity.

Those of us who struggle in our own ways, small or great, trickles or rivers, to create, are constantly having to unlearn what the world would teach us; it is not easy to keep a child's high creativity in these late years of the twentieth century.