Works
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
A Ring of Endless Light
Madeleine L'Engle
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Madeleine L'Engle
A Wind in the Door
Madeleine L'Engle
An Acceptable Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Dragons in the Waters
Madeleine L'Engle
And Both Were Young
Madeleine L'Engle
Meet the Austins
Madeleine L'EngleFamous Madeleine L'Engle Quotes
“The joys of love… last only a moment. The sorrows of love last all the life long.”
Source: The Joys of Love
Madeleine L'Engle Quotes about love
“The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.”
Source: Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
Madeleine L'Engle Quotes about life
Source: The Irrational Season
“And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.”
Source: A Ring of Endless Light
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Source: A Wrinkle in Time
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Madeleine L'Engle: Trending quotes
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.
The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Context: 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 Quotes
Section 1.10 <!-- p. 32 -->
Source: The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. 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.
“Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light.”
Source: A Ring of Endless Light (1980)
“We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.”
Source: A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings
“Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.”
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)
Context: 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…
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.
A writer of fantasy, fairly tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.
Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it.
“Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”
Section 1.16 <!-- p. 50 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: 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.
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened.
Section 1.9 <!-- p. 28 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: My husband is my most ruthless critic. … Sometimes he will say, "It's been said better before." Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.
"Instruments" in The Weather of the Heart (1978)
Context: I endeavor
To hold the I as one only for the cloud
Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed
To be responsible. Its light against my face
Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place
Singing, each compassed by the rest,
The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least.
It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part
of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart,
And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join:
Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.
“Suddenly she knew. She knew! Love.”
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Context: Suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's. And she had her love for them. But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?
“I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about.”
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn't get along together, and what made people tick. That's why I started to write stories.
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. 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 avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. 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.
A Stone for a Pillow (1986), as quoted in If Grace Is True : Why God Will Save Every Person (2003) by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, p. 223
Context: 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.
“I have advice for people who want to write.”
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
Section 1.10 <!-- p. 32 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. 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.
Section 1.16 <!-- p. 49 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world.
All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.
Section 4.4 <!-- p. 198 - 199-->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: "Why do you write for children?" My immediate response to this question is, "I don't."... 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.
Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it's perfectly true. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in Wrinkle, not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it.
The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Context: We rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.
The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Context: No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.
“We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.”
Section 1.16 <!-- p. 43 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.
Section 4.21 <!-- p. 244 - 245 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.
Section 1.3 <!-- p. 10 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself.
Section 2.5 <!-- p. 102 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God.
“I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?”
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: Wrinkle, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?
Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.
Someone said, "It's all been done before."
Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.
"Instruments" in The Weather of the Heart (1978)
Context: I endeavor
To hold the I as one only for the cloud
Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed
To be responsible. Its light against my face
Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place
Singing, each compassed by the rest,
The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least.
It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part
of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart,
And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join:
Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Context: Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure.
“Language is often changed by writers.”
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: Language is often changed by writers. We speak English today because Chaucer chose to write in the language of the common people, rather than the Latin or French used by those who were educated. James Joyce had an almost equally profound effect on language when he wrote about the inner self, rather than the outer self.
“In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.”
Section 4.21 <!-- p. 244 - 245 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.
Section 4.8 <!-- p. 208 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. I don't need to know the difference between a children's book and an adult one; it's the questions that have come from thinking about it that are important. I wish we'd stop finding answers for everything. One of the reasons my generation has mucked up the world to such an extent is our loss of the sense of the mysterious.
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: Wrinkle, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?
Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.
Someone said, "It's all been done before."
Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. 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 avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. 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.
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: One day back in the fifties my father and I were watching a program on our black and white TV which included an interview with an elderly man who answered one question by remarking, "Just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean the fire's gone out in the furnace."
The screen went black as the program went off the air, and we heard the announcer say, "There will be a brief interlude of organ music."
Certainly that mild quip of the elderly man wouldn't shock anybody today. We might laugh appreciatively at his wit, but that would be the extent of our reaction. The change in point of view has been equally radical in the world of books. Somehow or other I've never gotten around to reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, but I doubt if it would shock me.
Section 4.22 <!-- p. 246 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: 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. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.
Section 3.13 <!-- p. 183 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: St. John said, "And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it ( I need the double meaning here of comprehend). This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take us.
“Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need”
The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005)
Context: Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
Section 1.14 <!-- p. 40 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
“My protagonists, male and female, are me.”
The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Context: My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and.... For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.
“The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not.”
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I don't want to dump on TV, but there's no doubt that our language has been changed by television, especially by the media, which tries to manipulate us into being consumers. Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers. What does the consumer think? What does the consumer want? How ugly. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes. I want us to be nourishers. To be a librarian, particularly a librarian for young adults, is to be a nourisher, to share stories, offer books full of new ideas. We live in a world which has changed radically in the last half century, and story helps us to understand and live creatively with change.
The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not.
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.
A writer of fantasy, fairly tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.
Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it.
The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Context: If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. Many … books are from this realm… books on Hindu myth, Chinese folklore, the life of Buddha, tales of American Indians, books that lead our children beyond all boundaries and into the one language of all mankind.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth... The extraordinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how unscientific it is, but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of an evolution that wasn’t to be formulated for thousands of years? Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space.
“Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers.”
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I don't want to dump on TV, but there's no doubt that our language has been changed by television, especially by the media, which tries to manipulate us into being consumers. Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers. What does the consumer think? What does the consumer want? How ugly. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes. I want us to be nourishers. To be a librarian, particularly a librarian for young adults, is to be a nourisher, to share stories, offer books full of new ideas. We live in a world which has changed radically in the last half century, and story helps us to understand and live creatively with change.
The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not.
“I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer.”
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it.
