Top 427 Quotes & Sayings by Madeleine L'Engle - Page 5

Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.

God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

Friends do everything they can to protect each other." --Polly

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.

Only Christ can free us from the prison of legalism, and then only if we are willing to be freed.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

People are more than just the way they look.

If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

there are dozens and dozens of ways to be a family ... Family tends to happen.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation. . . works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter. . . The offerings of creation. . . our glimpses of truth.

The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it.

Love is the one surprise.

I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.

It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.

It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.

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

Nothing important is completely explicable.

One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

I have never lived before...Until this summer, I did not know what it was to be alive.

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.

Like and equal are two entirely different things.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

poets are born knowing the language of angels

When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

Be aware that rigidity imprisons.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

And I can't say it now. I can't say what I want to say. I hold you-- I-- I clutch you, because I love you so desperately, and time is so short, we have such a little time in which to live and be young, even at best, and I put my arms around you and hold you because I want to love you while I can and I want to know I'm loving you, only it doesn't mean anything because you aren't afraid. You aren't frightened so that you want to clutch it all while you can.

If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.

I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

People become trustworthy when they are trusted.

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

Refusing to accept God's love because we're unworthy - of course we're unworthy! - is another golden calf.

A good laugh heals a lot of hurts.

I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it.

Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!

I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.

Art is communication.

We human beings grow through our failures, not our virtues.

If I didn't get fond I could be happy all the time.

Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

We tend to think things are new because we've just discovered them.

I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."