Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

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
Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.

Madeleine L'Engle
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.

Madeleine L'Engle
We rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.

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
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
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
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
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
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
Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

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
If we aren't capable of being hurt we aren't capable of feeling joy.

Madeleine L'Engle
There are dozens and dozens of ways to be a family... Family tends to happen.

Madeleine L'Engle
Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.

Madeleine L'Engle
My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and.... For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.

Madeleine L'Engle
Language is often changed by writers. We speak English today because Chaucer chose to write in the language of the common people, rather than the Latin or French used by those who were educated. James Joyce had an almost equally profound effect on language when he wrote about the inner self, rather than the outer self.

Madeleine L'Engle
It is all right to wallow in one's journal; it is a way of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self-centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don't take out on family and friends.

Madeleine L'Engle
You don't know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling? A happy medium is something I wonder if you'll ever learn.

Madeleine L'Engle
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?'

Madeleine L'Engle
What should happen to us is that we should grow to whatever is our peak, and then blow up in a blast of fireworks.

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

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
If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free...

Madeleine L'Engle
An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world.

Madeleine L'Engle
It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

Madeleine L'Engle
The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it's far less mind boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us.

Madeleine L'Engle
Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.

Madeleine L'Engle
Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might.

Madeleine L'Engle
A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

Madeleine L'Engle