Madeleine L'Engle: Trending quotes (page 11)

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)

People , Truth , Understanding

“My young friend who was taught that she was so sinful the only way an angry God could be persuaded to forgive her was by Jesus dying for her, was also taught that part of the joy of the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy. But it is a belief limited not only to the more rigid sects. I know a number of highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who consider as a heresy my faith that God's loving concern for his creation will outlast all our willfulness and pride. No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of love… Origen held this belief and was ultimately pronounced a heretic. Gregory of Nyssa, affirming the same loving God, was made a saint. Some people feel it to be heresy because it appears to deny man his freedom to refuse to love God. But this, it seems to me, denies God his freedom to go on loving us beyond all our willfulness and pride. If the Word of God is the light of the world, and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the dark corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be given the grace to respond with love — and of our own free will.”

Madeleine L'Engle

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Love , God , People , World

“As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

Flowers , Housing

“I sometimes think God is a s--t — and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s--t.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Newsweek interview (2004)

God , Thinking

“There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Life

“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

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Love , Life , People , Courage

“What can we give a child when there is nothing left?
All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 4.6
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Truth , Thinking

“Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you."”

Madeleine L'Engle

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Books , Question

“The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 1.5
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

“I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing."”

Madeleine L'Engle

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Life , Death , Children , Books

“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 1.14
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Pain , Faith , Thinking

“I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Life , Women , People , Soul

“I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Madeleine L'Engle

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Love , God , Parent

“The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 3.13
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Children , World , Thinking , Light

“How do we teach a child — our own, or those in a classroom — to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have — or need — answers.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 1.16
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Love , People , Understanding , Question

“When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we escape our self-conscious selves.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 1.3
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Time

“A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.
It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 4.5 
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Truth , Literature

“We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 2.2
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

World , Imagination

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Way , Age

“Life is full of questions, and we are free to ask them, to understand, occasionally, that we are not going to get an answer, or at least not the answer we expect, and then we are called to move on. But I believe that God encourages us to ask questions.”

Madeleine L'Engle

The Rock that Is Higher (1993)

God , Life , Understanding , Question