Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

Madeleine L'Engle
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.

Madeleine L'Engle
I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over.

Madeleine L'Engle
I sometimes think God is a s—t — and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s—t.

Madeleine L'Engle
Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

Madeleine L'Engle
I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
When I look at the galaxies on a clear night - when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged... I rejoice that I am a part of it.

Madeleine L'Engle
I wrote, after an early rejection, X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise...

Madeleine L'Engle
We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.

Madeleine L'Engle
We tend to think things are new because we've just discovered them.

Madeleine L'Engle
If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive. If a friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it should be cut out, and quickly.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.

Madeleine L'Engle
Meg, I give you your faults." "My faults!" Meg cried. "Your faults." "But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!" "Yes," Mrs. Whatsit said. "However, I think you'll find they'll come in very handy on Camazotz.

Madeleine L'Engle
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.

Madeleine L'Engle
Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

Madeleine L'Engle
The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist—the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

Madeleine L'Engle
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

Madeleine L'Engle
Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this — and out of nothing — can still count the hairs of my head.

Madeleine L'Engle
One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.

Madeleine L'Engle
I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it.

Madeleine L'Engle
I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing."

Madeleine L'Engle