Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Is it that bad, Mrs. Bowen?" Clement asked.Emily shook her head. "Gertrude's been hurt and so she's generalizing. It's a pretty good country on the whole, and the people in it, too. We have our faults and they may be glaring, and we have individuals we may not be proud of, but take us by and large we'll stick our necks our for something we believe in, and that in itself may be a fault, but it's one I like.""Bravo," Abe said.
Madeleine L'Engle
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.
Madeleine L'Engle
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
Madeleine L'Engle
Because you're not what I would have you be I blind myself to who in truth you are.
Madeleine L'Engle
Because you're not what I would have you be I blind myself to who in truth you are.
Madeleine L'Engle
There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.
Madeleine L'Engle
There’s no such thing as an unbreakable scientific rule, because, sooner or later, they all seem to get broken. Or to change.
Madeleine L'Engle
If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.
Madeleine L'Engle
When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.
Madeleine L'Engle
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
Right now I am like the unborn baby in the womb, knowing nothing except the comforting warmth of the amniotic fluid in which I swim, the comforting nourishment entering my body from a source I cannot see or understand. My whole being comes from an unseen, unknown nurturer. By that nurturer I am totally loved and protected, and that love is forever. It does not end when I am precipitated out of the safe waters of the womb into the unsafe world. It will. It end when I breathe my last, mortal breath. That love manifested itself joyously in the creation of the universe, became particular for us in Jesus, and will show itself most gloriously in the Second Coming. We need not fear.
Madeleine L'Engle
Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.
Madeleine L'Engle
Questions are disturbing, especially those which may threaten our traditions, our institutions, our security. But questions never threaten the living God, who is constantly calling us, and who affirms for us that love is stronger than hate, blessings stronger than cursing.
Madeleine L'Engle
Some of these questions don't have finite answers, but the questions themselves are important. Don't stop asking, and don't let anybody tell you the questions aren't worth it. They are.
Madeleine L'Engle
We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.
Madeleine L'Engle
We cannot always cry at the right timeand who is to say which time is right?
Madeleine L'Engle
But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.
Madeleine L'Engle
And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.
Madeleine L'Engle
We all tend to make zealous judgement, and thereby close ourselves off from revelation.
Madeleine L'Engle
Lords of blue and Lords of gold,Lords of wind and waters wild,Lords of time that's growing old,When will come the season mild?When will come blue Madoc's child?
Madeleine L'Engle
Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love. That’s how it works best.
Madeleine L'Engle
Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.
Madeleine L'Engle
One night after dinner a group of us were talking about the supernatural, and one of our dinner guests said that when the electric light was invented, people began to lose the dimension of the supernatural. In the days before we could touch a switch and flood every section of the room with light, there were always shadows in the corner, shadows which moved with candlelight, with firelight; and these shadows were an outward and visible sign that things are not always what they seem; there are things which are not visible to the mortal human being; there are things beyond our ken.
Madeleine L'Engle
We're not peculiar.""Oh, yes, you are. Don't you realize that in my world my parents are peculiar because they'd never been divorced? Basically because it would have been too much trouble. But you live in a world where not only are your parents not divorced, they appear to love each other
Madeleine L'Engle
All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.
Madeleine L'Engle
My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business...
Madeleine L'Engle
Being alive hurts. I have found it best not to rush for the aspirin bottle. - A Severed Wasp
Madeleine L'Engle
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
Calvin said, "Do you know that this is the first time I've seen you without your glasses?""I'm blind as a bat without them. I'm near-sighted, like father.""Well, you know what, you've got dream-boat eyes," Calvin said. "Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.
Madeleine L'Engle
Grandfather looked away from me and out to sea, and when he spoke, it was as though he spoke to himself. “The obligations of normal human kindness – chesed, as the Hebrew has it – that we all owe. But there’s a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There’s a kind of vanity in goodness.”I could hardly believe my ears. “But aren’t we supposed to be good?”“I’m not sure.” Grandfather’s voice was heavy. “I do know that we’re not good, and there’s a lot of truth to the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Madeleine L'Engle
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.
Madeleine L'Engle
The foolish of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of god is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that may not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath choses the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And bade things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.
Madeleine L'Engle
I would, quite often, like to be grownup, wise, and sophisticated. But these gifts are not mine.
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
In a world where pleasure rules, people tend to be undeveloped in every way. " A House Like a Lotus
Madeleine L'Engle
Lords of space and Lords of time,Lords of blessing, Lords of grace,Who is in the warmer clime?Who will follow Madoc's rhyme?Blue will alter time and space.
Madeleine L'Engle
Nothing loved is ever lost or perished.
Madeleine L'Engle
Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?
Madeleine L'Engle
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
Madeleine L'Engle
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
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
As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.
Madeleine L'Engle
Emily looked over at Courtney. He was still asleep. For a long time she had thought that if you loved anyone you had to tell him everything: go to him and confess as in the dream; there could be no secrets. But now in the dark of early morning with the copper bottle cold against her fee she felt that this desire to tell all was simply an evasion of responsibility, a weakness in wanting to push on to the person you love something that is your own responsibility to solve. It would be easier for her to tell Courtney all about Abe, to come to him as he sat at this desk in the chill little workroom and confess, to hand the responsibility for her ambivalence to him, to let him settle the problem of her puny conscience for her.But I know, she thought, lying there beside him on Madame Pedroti's lumpy bed, that if I love Courtney that is the last thing I must do. If I love Courtney he must never know.
Madeleine L'Engle
I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.I Name you Calvin.I Name you Mr. Jenkins.I Name you Proginoskes.I fill you with Naming.Be!Be, butterfly and behemoth,be galaxy and grasshopper,star and sparrow,you matter,you are,be!Be caterpillar and comet,Be porcupine and planet,sea sand and solar system,sing with us,dance with us,rejoice with us,for the glory of creation,seagulls and seraphimangle worms and angel host,chrysanthemum and cherubim.(O cherubim.)Be!Sing for the gloryof the living and the lovingthe flaming of creationsing with usdance with usbe with us.Be!"- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door
Madeleine L'Engle
For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.
Madeleine L'Engle
I was at the annual meeting of a state library association a few years later, when the children were in the process of leaving the nest, and one of the librarians asked me, "What do you think you and Hugh have done which was the best for your children?"I answered immediately and without thinking, "We love each other.
Madeleine L'Engle
I didn't mean to tell you," Mrs. Whatsit faltered. "I didn't mean ever to let you know. But oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!" "Yyouu are sstill verry yyoungg," Mrs Witch said, her voice faintly chiding. The Medium sat looking happily at the star-filled sky in her ball, smiling, and nodding and chuckling gently. But Meg noticed that her eyes were drooping, and suddenly her head fell forward and she gave a faint snore."Poor thing," Mrs Whatsit said, "we've worn her out. It's very hard work for her.
Madeleine L'Engle
It was a star," Mrs. Whatsit said sadly. "A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won, oh, yes, my children, it won. But it lost its life in the winning.
Madeleine L'Engle
It was still twilight when they reached the flat rock. They sat, and the stone still held the warmth of the day's sun. At first there were only occasional sparkles, but as it got darker Chuck was lost in a daze pf delight as a galaxy of fireflies twinkled on and off, flinging upward in a blaze of light, dropping earthward like falling stars, moving in contiuous effervescent dance.
Madeleine L'Engle
If I'm confused, or upset, or angry, if I can go out and look at the stars I'll almost always get back a sense of proportion. It's not that they make me feel insignificant; it's the very opposite; they make me feel that everything matters, be it ever so small, and that there's meaning to life even when it seems most meaningless.
Madeleine L'Engle
They've never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was so bad that I could have made better time with a horse.
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... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.
Madeleine L'Engle
It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to be stopped. It's all crazy. . . . Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but *he* is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.
Madeleine L'Engle
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
Madeleine L'Engle
Charles Wallace, the danger here is greatest for you." "Why?""Because of what you are. Just exactly because of what you are you will be by far the most vulnerable. You must stay with Meg and Calvin. You must not go off on your own. Beware of pride and arrogance, Charles, for they may betray you.
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 all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.
Madeleine L'Engle
Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.
Madeleine L'Engle
All right, all right, you go right on thinking you an act of God created in his image, and I’ll go right on thinking I’m descended from an ape. When you look in the mirror I should think you’d feel pretty discouraged; I wouldn’t be happy to look at myself and think that my faces is an Imago Dei. It wouldn’t make me feel I’d done very well by God. But when I look in the mirror and that I’m descended from an ape, I feel I’ve done remarkably well.
Madeleine L'Engle
I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.
Madeleine L'Engle