Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world.
All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.

Madeleine L'Engle
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.

Madeleine L'Engle
When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take use all the way.

Madeleine L'Engle
We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. 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.

Madeleine L'Engle
I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.

Madeleine L'Engle
The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.

Madeleine L'Engle
She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
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.

Madeleine L'Engle
I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.

Madeleine L'Engle
Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

Madeleine L'Engle
What can we give a child when there is nothing left?
All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.

Madeleine L'Engle
I endeavor
To hold the I as one only for the cloud
Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed
To be responsible. Its light against my face
Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place
Singing, each compassed by the rest,
The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least.
It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part
of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart,
And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join:
Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.

Madeleine L'Engle
The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

Madeleine L'Engle
If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.

Madeleine L'Engle
You've got to learn to walk through a pigpen and not get dirty.

Madeleine L'Engle
Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

Madeleine L'Engle
Life is the greatest gift that could ever be conceived... A daffodil pushing up through the dark earth to the spring, knowing somehow deep in its roots that spring and light and sunshine will come, has more courage and more knowledge of the value of life than any human being I've met.

Madeleine L'Engle
Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

Madeleine L'Engle
Here we are living in a world of "identity crises," and most of us have no idea what an identity is.
Half the problem is that an identity is something which must be understood intuitively, rather than in terms of provable fact. An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

Madeleine L'Engle
I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.

Madeleine L'Engle