Madeleine L'Engle Quotes - Page 2

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.
Madeleine L'Engle
One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.
Madeleine L'Engle
A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.
Madeleine L'Engle
we’re all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can’t tell which is which
Madeleine L'Engle
An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers...To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy...If I try self consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals
Madeleine L'Engle
Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.
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
Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence.
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
Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other. That was surely the purest kind of thing.Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.
Madeleine L'Engle
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
Madeleine L'Engle
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
Madeleine L'Engle
From the shoulders, slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry. Calvin fell to his knees. "No," Mrs. Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs. Whatsit's voice. "Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.
Madeleine L'Engle
She was silent; the great wings almost stopped moving; only a delicate stirring seemed to keep them aloft. "Listen, then," Mrs. Whatsit said. The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt that she could almost reach out and touch them: "Sing unto the Lord a new song, and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that there is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord!
Madeleine L'Engle
Hate is like cancer, separate from the normal cells, devouring and not being nourished, annihilating itself along with everything it attacks.
Madeleine L'Engle
Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.
Madeleine L'Engle
Meg’s eyes were too bright. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.
Madeleine L'Engle
There're a lot of things you don't understand." Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. "I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma's death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it
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
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
Why does anybody do anything?" Mimi asked impatiently. "Most of the time we don't know--any of us.
Madeleine L'Engle
Listen, she said, "cherubim have come to my planet before.""I know that. Where do you think I got my information?""What do you know about us?""I have heard that your host planet is shadowed, that it is troubled.""It is beautiful," Meg said defensively.She felt a rippling of his wings. "In the middle of your cities?""Well-no-but I don't live in a city.""And is your planet peaceful?""Well-no-it isn't very peaceful.""I had the idea," Proginoskes moved reluctantly within her mind, "that there are wars on your planet. People fighting and killing each other.""Yes, that's so, but-""And children go hungry.""Yes.""And people don't understand each other.""Not always.""And there's-there's hate?""Yes."She felt Proginoskes pulling away. "All I want to do," he was murmuring to himself, "is go some place quiet and recite the names of the stars...
Madeleine L'Engle
Do you think things always have an explanation? "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.
Madeleine L'Engle
Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.
Madeleine L'Engle
Meg looked. The dark shadow was still there. It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night. And where the shadow was, the stars were not visible.What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort?
Madeleine L'Engle
When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can't explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn't happen very often. But I obey it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That's all I know, kid. I'm not holding anything back. Maybe it's because I'm supposed to meet you. You tell me.
Madeleine L'Engle
We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.
Madeleine L'Engle
It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!
Madeleine L'Engle
I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!
Madeleine L'Engle
Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us.
Madeleine L'Engle
Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would NOT make everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of the master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God's ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.
Madeleine L'Engle
You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.
Madeleine L'Engle
Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything.... It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.
Madeleine L'Engle
A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.
Madeleine L'Engle
Jesus, who comes across in the Gospels as extraordinarily strong, begged in the garden, with drops of sweat like blood running down his face, that he might be spared the terrible cup ahead of him, the betrayal and abandonment by his friends, death on the cross. Because Jesus cried out in anguish, we may too. But our fear is less frequent and infinitely less if we are close to the Creator. Jesus, having cried out, then let his fear go, and moved on.
Madeleine L'Engle
Women in Jesus' day were less than second-class citizens.
Madeleine L'Engle
Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.
Madeleine L'Engle
Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.
Madeleine L'Engle
We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.
Madeleine L'Engle
In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure...
Madeleine L'Engle
In your language you have a form of poetry called a sonnet...It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not?...There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?...And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?''No.''But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn't he?''Yes." Calvin nodded again.'So,' said Mrs. Whatsit.'So what?''Oh, do not be stupid, boy!' Mrs. Whatsit scolded. 'You know perfectly well what I am driving at!''You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but with freedom within it?''Yes,' Mrs. Whatsit said. "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
Madeleine L'Engle
Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
Madeleine L'Engle
It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.
Madeleine L'Engle
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
And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.
Madeleine L'Engle
This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.
Madeleine L'Engle
... 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
There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.
Madeleine L'Engle
And we're not alone, you know, children," came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. "All through the universe, it's being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it's a grand and exciting battle. I know it's hard for you to understand about size, how there's very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy. You think about that, and maybe it won't seem strange to you that some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it's done so well.""Who have our fighters been? Calvin asked."Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs. Whatsit said. Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly. "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!""Of course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by.
Madeleine L'Engle
We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.
Madeleine L'Engle
Lords of melody and song,Lords of roses burning bright,Blue will right the ancient wrong,Though the way is dark and long,Blue will shine with loving light.
Madeleine L'Engle
Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.
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
Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It's not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That's not what it's really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things we learn from.
Madeleine L'Engle
One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.
Madeleine L'Engle
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
Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.
Madeleine L'Engle
But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.
Madeleine L'Engle
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
Believing takes practice.
Madeleine L'Engle