Quotes by Madeleine L'Engle
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When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband.

Refusing to accept God's love because we're unworthy -- of course we're unworthy! -- is another golden calf.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

The chief reason that A Wrinkle in Time was rejected for over two years and by thirty-odd publishers was because it is a difficult book for many adults, the decision was made to market it as a children's book; it won a medal for children's books.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.

To write for children at all is an act of faith.

Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.

The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No

matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.

I tell a friend that I hope for Mother's death, and he is shocked; he sees it as a failure in my love toward her.

Perhaps it is. I don't know.

When we make ourselves vulnerable, we do open ourselves to pain, sometimes excruciating pain. The more people we love, the more we are liable to be hurt, and not only by the people we love, but for the people we love.

Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love.

I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one absolute: God is love.

It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven't lost any of my past, and I am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look to the future.

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take.

In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality.

Think of the person you love the most in the world. Do you really see them visually? Or don't you see on a much deeper level? It's lots easier to visualize people we don't know very well.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast.

Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.

Only Christ can free us from the prison of legalism, and then only if we are willing to be freed.

On the other side of pain, there is still love.

We do not love each other without changing each other.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.

Meg, when people don't know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named.

Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts? I do face facts, Meg said. They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.

The primary needs can be filled without language. We can eat, sleep, make love, build a house, bear children, without language. But we cannot ask questions. We cannot ask, 'Who am I? Who are you? Why?

The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books, Miranda said. It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

Prayer is whenever we consciously try to get in contact with the numinous, the ineffable, the marvelous.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time.

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.

Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think.

I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day.

We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble -- times when I have seen people tempted to deny God -- when he says, The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take.

You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.

When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is.

A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.

In our dreams we are able to fly ... and that is a remembering of how we were meant to be.

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

If our lives are truly hid with Christ in God, the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

To be a witness means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Wild nights are my glory!

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, This is what I believe. Finished. What I believe is alive ... and open to growth.

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught. What a teacher can do... in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

I'm different,and I like being different.Calvin's voice was unnaturally loud.
Maybe I don't like being different,Meg said.but I don't want to be like everybody else,either.

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it.

Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?

It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.

I do not know everything; still many things I understand.

I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

Like and equal are not the same thing at all. -- Meg Murray.

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.

If a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.