Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

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“It was a dark and stormy night.”

“Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?"
I do face facts," Meg said.
They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.”

“Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.”

“If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.”

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

—Ditta”

“God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.”

“Wild nights are my glory!”

“Art is communication.”

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”

“The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.”

“One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.”

“Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.”

“It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.”

“That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.”

“Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.”

“When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.”

“Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.”

“People become trustworthy when they are trusted.”

“Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.”

“Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, "It's my own business.”

“I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.”

“Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

“you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

“There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.”

“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.”

“We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.”

“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”

“God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.”

“That's a sure way to tell about somebody--the way they play, or don't play, make-believe.”

“The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books," Miranda said. "It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.”

“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”

“You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.”

“I think that this scene is upsetting because it calls us beyond fact into the vast world of imagination, and imagination is a word of many dimensions.”

“Nothing, no one, is too small to matter. What you do is going to make a difference.”

“Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.”

“Poets are born knowing the language of angels.”

“No! andare not the same thing at all!”

“Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

“Love is the one surprise.”

“Vitam impendre vero. (To stake one's life for the truth.)”

“Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.”

“Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.”

“If I didn't get fond I could be happy all the time.”

“Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.”

“Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast”

“Wherever there's laughter, there is heaven.”

“Nothing important is completely explicable.”

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”

“When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.”