Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is.

Madeleine L'Engle
For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

Madeleine L'Engle
What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!
Dante

Madeleine L'Engle
There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate.

Madeleine L'Engle
I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.

Madeleine L'Engle
You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.

Madeleine L'Engle
Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

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
Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.

Madeleine L'Engle
If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.

Madeleine L'Engle
Severe illness isolates those in close contact with it, because it inevitably narrows the focus of concern. To a certain extent this can lead to healing, but not if the circle of concern is so tight that it cannot be broken into, or out of.

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

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

Madeleine L'Engle
It's degrading and humiliating and dehumanizing. You stop being real. You lose your reality and it shatters your faith in other people's reality. Rape is a kind of murder.

Madeleine L'Engle
They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space." "Oh," the thin beast said. "Aren't they lonely?

Madeleine L'Engle
When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

Madeleine L'Engle
What I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.

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
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.

Madeleine L'Engle
I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.

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