Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

270 Sourced Quotes

I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day.

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

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
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
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
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
Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.

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
Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.

Madeleine L'Engle
As I listen to the silence, I learn that my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable. To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Madeleine L'Engle
You're going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.

Madeleine L'Engle
I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take.

Madeleine L'Engle
A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.
It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.

Madeleine L'Engle
Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate.

Madeleine L'Engle
To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take.

Madeleine L'Engle
Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go our sane self control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the spirit.

Madeleine L'Engle
Don't keep putting your anger off. Until you go through it, you can't get out of it.

Madeleine L'Engle
It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?

Madeleine L'Engle
It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.

Madeleine L'Engle
All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

Madeleine L'Engle
A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.

Madeleine L'Engle
My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

Madeleine L'Engle
Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.

Madeleine L'Engle
But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?

Madeleine L'Engle
When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband.

Madeleine L'Engle
If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children.

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