Madeleine L'Engle citations

Page 5

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.”

“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.”

“We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

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

“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.”