Madeleine L'Engle: Trending quotes (page 10)

“Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.”

“For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.”

“I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day.”

“If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.”

“I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”

“If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.”

“You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

“You're going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.”

“Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!”

“She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.”

“Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate.”

“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.”

“It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity…. I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah… Faith is best expressed in story.”

“It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists.”

“I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise…”

“Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved.”

“One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.”

“When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is.”

“A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations.
What!?!
It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad.
Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil.
Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision.
Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us."
And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word.”