Madeleine L'Engle - Life Quotes

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In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

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

Madeleine L'Engle
Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?" I do face facts," Meg said. They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.

Madeleine L'Engle
I feel as though I'm not breathing when I'm out of his presence. He's the oxygen in my air, the sun in my universe, the staff of my life. —Jane Gardiner

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
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
As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

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
We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

Madeleine L'Engle
We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.

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
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
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
If it can be verified, we don't need faith.... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Madeleine L'Engle
A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will produce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

Madeleine L'Engle
Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.

Madeleine L'Engle
And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.

Madeleine L'Engle
There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with 'explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

Madeleine L'Engle
Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.

Madeleine L'Engle
I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know.

Madeleine L'Engle
A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

Madeleine L'Engle
Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved.

Madeleine L'Engle
It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation... works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter... The offerings of creation... our glimpses of truth.

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
If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.

Madeleine L'Engle
Maybe the theatre isn't any place for a reasonable human being after all. It keeps your emotions in such a constant state of upheaval. It's really terribly wearing. I wonder if I could stand it, one emotional upset after the other just going on and on for the rest of my life.

Madeleine L'Engle