Madeleine L'Engle citations

Page 3

“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.”

“I love, therefore I am vulnerable.”

“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.”