Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
There are dozens and dozens of ways to be a family... Family tends to happen.

Madeleine L'Engle
We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.

Madeleine L'Engle
Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.

Madeleine L'Engle
Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.

Madeleine L'Engle
Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.

Madeleine L'Engle
Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure.

Madeleine L'Engle
The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.

Madeleine L'Engle
Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

Madeleine L'Engle
If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.

Madeleine L'Engle
The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.

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
I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.

Madeleine L'Engle
For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.

Madeleine L'Engle
It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.

Madeleine L'Engle
How do we teach a child — our own, or those in a classroom — to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have — or need — answers.

Madeleine L'Engle