Madeleine L'Engle citations

Page 6

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.”

“Nothing important is completely explicable.”

“My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.”

“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.”

“Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being in joyful rhythm.”

“Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding.”

“Meg, I give you your faults."

"My faults!" Meg cried.

"Your faults."

"But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!"

"Yes," Mrs. Whatsit said. "However, I think you'll find they'll come in very handy on Camazotz.”

“The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.”

“All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”

“We tend to think things are new because we just discovered them.”

“Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.”

“If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”

“You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.”

“We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.”

“George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”