Madeleine L'Engle: Quotes about life

Madeleine L'Engle was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Madeleine L'Engle: 446   quotes 5   likes

“The joys of love… last only a moment. The sorrows of love last all the life long.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: The Joys of Love

Love , Life , Joy

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Life , Freedom

“There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.””

Madeleine L'Engle

The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.”
I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

Life , Children , World , History

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle
Life , Faith , Joy

“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

Life , People , Thinking

“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Faith , Life , Faith , Joy

“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

The Expanding Universe (1963)
Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Life , Books , Star , Universe

“Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Wind in the Door

Source: A Wind in the Door

Love , Life , People , Feeling

“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

Life , God , People , Way

“And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.”

Madeleine L'Engle A Ring of Endless Light

Source: A Ring of Endless Light

Life

“My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.”

Madeleine L'Engle An Acceptable Time

Source: An Acceptable Time

Life , Pain , Business , Universe

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

Madeleine L'Engle

Source: The Irrational Season

Life , Travel , Light

“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.”

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Love , Life

“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

“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 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

“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