Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.

Madeleine L'Engle
During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.

Madeleine L'Engle
It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.... I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah... Faith is best expressed in story.

Madeleine L'Engle
That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

Madeleine L'Engle
We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Madeleine L'Engle
I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

Madeleine L'Engle
The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.

Madeleine L'Engle
My husband is my most ruthless critic. … Sometimes he will say, "It's been said better before." Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

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

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
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
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
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
The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but... what we are meant to be.

Madeleine L'Engle
If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.

Madeleine L'Engle
Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

Madeleine L'Engle
If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.

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