Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

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“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.”

“The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.”

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”

“Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.”

“Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”

“Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.”

“I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”

“Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”

“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”

“In my dreams, I never have an age.”

“People are more than just the way they look.”

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

“It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.”

“If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.”

“Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.”

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

“When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.”

“Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?”

“It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”

“They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space."
"Oh," the thin beast said. "Aren't they lonely?”

“Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.”

“Only a fool is not afraid.”

“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'm apt to get drunk on words… Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.”

“We do not know what things look like.
We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing. -Aunt Beast”

“That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.”

“We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.”

“Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.”

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

“We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.”

“A good laugh heals a lot of hurts.”

“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”

“Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”

“Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.”

“Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”

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

“I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.”

“Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.”

“We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”

“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.”

“It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”

“She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.”

“In reading we must become creators.”

“It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.”

“You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

“An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.”

“On the other side of pain, there is still love.”