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Madeleine L'Engle Quotes
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Madeleine L'Engle was an American writer who wrote young adult fiction, including A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in science.

✵ 29. November 1918 – 6. September 2007  •  Other names مادلین لانقل
Madeleine L'Engle: 223 quotes5 likes

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

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

Madeleine L'Engle A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

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

Madeleine L'Engle

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

—Ditta”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: The Joys of Love

“Wild nights are my glory!”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“Art is communication.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: A Circle of Quiet

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: A Circle of Quiet

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

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

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

Madeleine L'Engle

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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

Madeleine L'Engle A Wind in the Door

Source: A Wind in the Door

“People become trustworthy when they are trusted.”

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle An Acceptable Time

Source: An Acceptable Time

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Mrs Whatsit, Ch. 1
Source: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Wind in the Door

Source: A Wind in the Door

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: The Irrational Season

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

Madeleine L'Engle Dragons in the Waters

Source: Dragons in the Waters

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Source: A Circle of Quiet
Context: In Kenneth Grahame's beautiful book, The Wind In The Willows, Mole and Rat go to the holy island of the great god, Pan. It is a superb piece of religious writing, but because it has gone beyond fact, it is deeply upsetting and untruthful to some people. If a story is not specified as being Christian, it is not Christian. But that is not so.
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.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

“Poets are born knowing the language of angels.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light

Source: A Ring of Endless Light

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Variant: Like and equal are not the same thing at all.
Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

“Love is the one surprise.”

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

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

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

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

Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light

Source: A Ring of Endless Light

“Nothing important is completely explicable.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Section 3.9
Source: The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Source: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art