Madeleine L'Engle Quotes: 31

• When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

• You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

• A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

• Some things have to be believed to be seen.

• 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

  A Wrinkle in Time

• Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

• Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.

  Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

• I do not know everything; still many things I understand.

  A Wrinkle in Time

• In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.

  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible"which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.

• A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

  A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings

• Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

• Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

• 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.

• I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished."What I believe is alive ... and open to growth

• We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

  Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

• Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

  A Wrinkle in Time

• It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.

• I saw Eternity the other night,Like a great ring of pure and endless light,All calm, as it was bright,And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,Driven by the spheres,Like a vast shadow moved, in which the worldAnd all her train were hurled.

  A Ring of Endless Light

• Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.

  A Wrinkle in Time

• But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them.—Ditta

  The Joys of Love

• It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

• Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• 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.

  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• A book comes and says, 'Write me.

• Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.

  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way.

  A Circle of Quiet

• 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.

  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.

  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

  The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

• 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.

  The Joys of Love