Top 100 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes
#1. Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.
Madeleine L'Engle
#2. Oh, girl, not woman, more than child, Which of us two is the more wild? So
Madeleine L'Engle
#3. 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
#7. Creativity comes from accepting that you're not safe, from being absolutely aware, and from letting go of control. It's a matter of seeing everything - even when you want to shut your eyes.
Madeleine L'Engle
#8. Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.
Madeleine L'Engle
#9. There is little character or loveliness in the face of someone who has shunned risk, avoided suffering and rejected life
Madeleine L'Engle
#10. Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.
Madeleine L'Engle
#11. When a character wants to do one thing and I want him to do another, the character is usually right.
Madeleine L'Engle
#12. I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!
Madeleine L'Engle
#13. The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.
Madeleine L'Engle
#14. Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.
Madeleine L'Engle
#15. The child is aware of unlimited potential, and this munificence is one of the joys of creativity.
Those of use who struggle in our own ways, small or great, trickles or rivers, to create, are constantly having to unlearn what the world would teach us...
Madeleine L'Engle
#16. It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.
Madeleine L'Engle
#17. Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.
Madeleine L'Engle
#18. Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.
Madeleine L'Engle
#19. One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.
Madeleine L'Engle
#20. Life ... is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
Madeleine L'Engle
#21. I am slowly coming to understand with all my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.
Madeleine L'Engle
#22. The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.
Madeleine L'Engle
#23. Prayer was never meant to be magic,' Mother said.
'Then why bother with it?' Suzy scowled.
'Because it's an act of love,' Mother said.
Madeleine L'Engle
#24. Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don't forget that he never promised he'd say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing ...
That he cares ... That is all. Nothing else.
Madeleine L'Engle
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast
Madeleine L'Engle
#28. We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
Madeleine L'Engle
#29. Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.
Madeleine L'Engle
#31. To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in the extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.
Madeleine L'Engle
#32. Who makes you least confused?"
"Calvin" There was no hesitation here. "When I'm with Calvin, I don't mind being me"
"You mean he makes you more you, don't you?"
"I guess you could put it that way.
Madeleine L'Engle
#33. 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
#34. To look at a work of art and then to make a judgement as to whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is Christian, is presumptuous.
Madeleine L'Engle
#35. We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.
Madeleine L'Engle
#37. You cannot take credit for your talents. It is what you do with them that counts.
Madeleine L'Engle
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible ...
Madeleine L'Engle
#42. In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.
Madeleine L'Engle
#43. When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.
Madeleine L'Engle
#44. The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
Madeleine L'Engle
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?
Madeleine L'Engle
#51. To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven't lost any of my past, and I am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look to the future.
Madeleine L'Engle
#52. That's quite something, to be loved by someone like Mrs Whatsit.
Madeleine L'Engle
#53. But BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time.
Madeleine L'Engle
#54. 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
#55. We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast
Madeleine L'Engle
#56. There is no way that you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true.
Madeleine L'Engle
#57. I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five and ... and ... and ...
Madeleine L'Engle
#58. As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.
Madeleine L'Engle
#59. When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.
Madeleine L'Engle
#60. Was she strong enough to allow both of them to be themselves? Bahama had instilled in her an honoring of promises, but she could not keep her promise unless she was willing to allow Nik to be Nik, not a projection of someone who could fill in all her empty spaces, heal all her wounds.
Madeleine L'Engle
#62. 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
#63. Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves ...
Madeleine L'Engle
#64. The very young woman can be charming and delightful and pretty but only a mature woman can be beautiful; and only a mature man can be strong enough to be tender.
Madeleine L'Engle
#65. Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
Madeleine L'Engle
#66. Ach,' she heard someone saying, 'I left mein ceinture dans le shower ce morgen. Quelle dope ich bin!
Madeleine L'Engle
#68. 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
#69. We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.
Madeleine L'Engle
#70. Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.
Madeleine L'Engle
#71. For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.
Madeleine L'Engle
#72. The joy and love were so tangible that Meg felt that if she only knew where to reach she could touch it with her bare hands.
Madeleine L'Engle
#73. I was only just beginning to realize what a horribly destructive thing hate is, how it destroys inwards as well as outwards. I
Madeleine L'Engle
#74. If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
Madeleine L'Engle
#75. I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.
Madeleine L'Engle
#76. Of course. I am well aware that the streets of New York are not safe, but then there is no longer any place in the world which is safe. One cannot live in perpetual fear, one has to be as prudent as possible, and get on with life. - A Severed Wasp
Madeleine L'Engle
#77. You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.
Madeleine L'Engle
#78. God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.
Madeleine L'Engle
#79. I cannot find it in me to believe that God enjoys long faces and scowls at merriment.
Madeleine L'Engle
#80. 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
#81. Remember you have to go at his speed not your own ... Adults take longer at this kind of thing then we do, particularly adults ... who [haven't] tried new thoughts for a long time ... but sometimes adults can go deeper then we can, if we're patient.
Madeleine L'Engle
#82. We want nothing from you that you do without grace or [ ... ] understanding.
Madeleine L'Engle
#83. A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
Madeleine L'Engle
#86. Again Mrs Which's voice reverberated through the cave. "Therre willl nno llonggerr bee sso manyy pplleasanntt thinggss too llookk att iff rressponssible ppeoplle ddo nnott ddoo ssomethingg abboutt thee unnppleassanntt oness.
Madeleine L'Engle
#89. Papa's always had the ability to remember the good things and let the bad ones go."
"Not a bad ability."
" ... I'm not sure. I think we have to remember it all before we can forgive it.
Madeleine L'Engle
#90. You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children
Madeleine L'Engle
#91. It's a lot simpler to adapt to low gravity, or no atmosphere, or even sandstorms than it is to hustle inhabitants.
Madeleine L'Engle
#92. We tend to think things are new because we just discovered them.
Madeleine L'Engle
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. You've got to learn to walk through a pigpen and not get dirty.
Madeleine L'Engle
#96. Wherever she was, holy laughter was present to heal and redeem.
Madeleine L'Engle
#97. George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble
times when I have seen people tempted to deny God
when he says, The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
Madeleine L'Engle
#99. The discoveries don't come when you're looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control.
Madeleine L'Engle
#100. Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It's a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here i am afflicted with it at my tender age.
Madeleine L'Engle
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