Top 427 Quotes & Sayings by Madeleine L'Engle - Page 3

How do we teach a child our own, or those in a classroom to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have or need answers.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take.

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

We live by revelations, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget all the questions and we become like the pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.

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.

Progo,' Meg asked. 'You memorized the names of all the stars - how many are there?' How many? Great heavens, earthling. I haven't the faintest idea.' But you said your last assignment was to memorize the names of all of them.' I did. All the stars in all the galaxies. And that's a great many.' But how many?' What difference does it make? I know their names. I don't know how many there are. It's their names that matter.

Don't keep putting your anger off. Until you go through it, you can't get out of it.

No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again - till next time.

our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.

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

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time.

Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves.

Everything we do, our entire interior monologue, is prayer.

At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

If I'm not free to fail, I'm not free to take risks and everything in life that's worth doing involves a willingness to take a risk.

If we aren't capable of being hurt we aren't capable of feeling joy.

What can we give a child when there is nothing left? All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.

To be born is to start the journey towards death.

Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth

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.

When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.

Easter is always the answer to "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!"

The prayer of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God as something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.

For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

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

artists ... all have a need that cannot be met by another human being.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one absolute: God is love.

The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it's far less mind boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us.

When we celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating that amazing time when the Word that shouted all the galaxies into being limited all power and, for love of us, came to us in the powerless body of a human baby.

I share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe "is as good as a burnt out candle."

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.

Yes! I dare disturb the universe.

I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

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

A new year can begin only because the old year ends.

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers.

It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God.

Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.

Growing up is a process that never ends. It isn't a point you attain so you can say, Hooray, I'm grown up. Some people never grow up. And nobody ever finishes growing. Or shouldn't. If you stop you might as well quit. What I have to tell you is that it never gets any easier. It goes right on being rough forever. But nothing that's easy is worth anything. You ought to have learned that by now. What happens as you keep on growing is that all of a sudden you realize that it's more exciting and beautiful than scary and awful.

There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.

Itt iss Eevill…" "What is going to happen?" "Wee wwill cconnttinnue tto ffightt!"… "And we’re not alone, you know, children," came Mrs.Whatsit, the comforter. "…some of the best fighters have come from your own planet…" "Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked. "Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs.Whatsit said. Mrs.Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly. "And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

science never threatens God - it opens up more possibilities.

Sometimes when we aren't looking, the holiness comes breaking through like a rainbow.

As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers

She always had to have someone to love...She couldn't seem to believe that anyone could really love her. She always thought it was because she was a star, not just because of her herself, and she always had to be reassured.

To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

wherever there's laughter, there is heaven