Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

Madeleine L'Engle
We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

Madeleine L'Engle
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Madeleine L'Engle
When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Madeleine L'Engle
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

Madeleine L'Engle
The artistic temperament... sometimes seems to me to be a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling, and when the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Madeleine L'Engle
Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light.

Madeleine L'Engle
In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

Madeleine L'Engle
It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.

Madeleine L'Engle
In Kenneth Grahame's beautiful book, The Wind In The Willows, Mole and Rat go to the holy island of the great god, Pan. It is a superb piece of religious writing, but because it has gone beyond fact, it is deeply upsetting and untruthful to some people. If a story is not specified as being Christian, it is not Christian. But that is not so.
I think that this scene is upsetting because it calls us beyond fact into the vast world of imagination, and imagination is a word of many dimensions.

Madeleine L'Engle
My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.

Madeleine L'Engle
Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
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.

Madeleine L'Engle
Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you."

Madeleine L'Engle
Artists... all have a need that cannot be met by another human being.

Madeleine L'Engle
All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

Madeleine L'Engle
Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?

Madeleine L'Engle
When we look at a painting, or hear a symphony, or read a book, and feel more Named, then, for us, that work is a work of Christian art. But to look at a work of art and then to make a judgment as to whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is Christian, is presumptuous. It is something we cannot know in any conclusive way. We can know only if it speaks within our own hearts, and leads us to living more deeply with Christ in God.

Madeleine L'Engle
Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

Madeleine L'Engle
We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Madeleine L'Engle
Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.

Madeleine L'Engle
We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

Madeleine L'Engle
But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

Madeleine L'Engle
Suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's. And she had her love for them. But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?

Madeleine L'Engle