Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

But if I knew everything, there would be no wonder, because what I believe in is far more than I know.

Remember you have to go at his speed not your own ... Adults take longer at this kind of thing then we do, particularly adults ... who [haven't] tried new thoughts for a long time ... but sometimes adults can go deeper then we can, if we're patient.

Mrs Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man's, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. No, she thought, it's not like a Greek centaur. Not in the least. From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water,

You're good in school. Everybody likes you." "For all the most unimportant reasons," Calvin said. "There hasn't been anybody, anybody in the world I could talk to. Sure, I can function on the same level as everybody else, I can hold myself down, but it isn't me.

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour - write, write, write.

Max had a book with her and began leafing through it, looking for something. "There's a passage our conversation reminds me of ..."
"What?"
"In the Upanishads -- a series of Sanskrit works which are part of the Veda. Here it is Pol, listen: In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. There is as much in that little space within the heart as there is in the whole world outside. Maybe that little space is the realty of your you and my me?"
"Could I copy that?" I asked.
"Of course. I've been watching that little space within your heart enlarging all year as more and more ideas are absorbed into it. Some people close their doors and lock them so that nothing can come in, and the space cannot hold anything as long as the heart clutches in self-protection or lust or greed. But if we're not afraid, that little space can be so large that one could put a whole universe in it and still have room for more.

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.

Meg looked. The dark shadow was still there. It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night. And where the shadow was, the stars were not visible.
What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort?

The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we are, we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our own points of reference to show us the way.

Carrying my babies was a marvelous mystery, lives growing unseen except by the slow swelling of my belly. Death is an even greater mystery ... The God I cry out to in anguish or joy can neither be proved nor disapproved. The hope I have that death is not the end of all our questions can neither be proved nor disproved.

In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.

Let's not worry about next year till we get through this one," Mrs. Murry said. "More French toast, boys?

What I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.

Are anybody's parents typical?

It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.

I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.

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.

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

What happens to what's happened?

You've got to learn to walk through a pigpen and not get dirty.

But our fear and our rejection does not take away from truth, and truth is what the Bible instructs us to know in order that we may be free.

To be alive is to be vulnerable.

She knew that the freedom was in herself, just as the prison had been.

The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God.

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.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

Ach,' she heard someone saying, 'I left mein ceinture dans le shower ce morgen. Quelle dope ich bin!

Where there is an unreconciled quarrel, everybody suffers

There's no such thing as an unbreakable scientific rule, because, sooner or later, they all seem to get broken. Or to change.

To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in the extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.

We're all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can't tell which is which

I think we're supposed to ask too much of each other; otherwise, nothing would ever get done.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.

...and I know he's something more. I guess I'll just have to accept it without understanding it... Maybe that's really the point I was trying to put across.

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.

Charles Wallace looked troubled. I don't think it's that. It's being able to understand a sort of language, like sometimes if I concentrate very hard I can understand the wind talking with the trees. You tell me, you see, sort of inad - inadvertently. That's a good word, isn't it? I got Mother to look it up in the dictionary for me this morning. I really must learn to read, except I'm afraid it will make it awfully hard for me in school next year if I already know things. I think it will be better if people go on thinking I'm not very bright. They won't hate me quite so much.

That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.

If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.

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.

One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.

when I'm mad I don't have room to be scared.

Oh, girl, not woman, more than child, Which of us two is the more wild? So

If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free ...

People are afraid of knowledge that is not yet theirs.

If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.

Life ... is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

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.

When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.

A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me, "Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?"
"Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts."
But I base my life on this belief.

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

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

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I

We cannot always cry at the right time
and who is to say which time is right?

Wild nights are my glory!

My husband is my most ruthless critic ... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

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

When I look at the galaxies on a clear night - when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged ... I rejoice that I am a part of it.

When have you been most you, the very most you?

But BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time.

So I know, with a sense of responsibility that hits me with a cold fist in the pit of my stomach, that what I am is going to make more difference to my own children and those I talk to and teach than anything I tell them.

People are more than just the way they look.

Aeschylus writes, In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.

This seemed an obvious sign from heaven. I should stop trying to write ... So the rejection on the fortieth birthday seemed an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie. I covered up the typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation. Then I walked around and around the room, bawling my head off. I was totally, unutterably miserable. Suddenly I stopped, because I realized what my subconscious mind was doing while I was sobbing: my subconscious mind was busy working out a novel about failure.

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.

I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

I simply take him into my heart, and then put him into God's hand.

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

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.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

I like to take the time out to listen to the trees, much in the same way that I listen to a sea shell, holding my ear against the rough bark of the trunk, hearing the inner singing of the sap. It's a lovely sound, the beating of the heart of the tree.

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ...

So we reached our decisions simultaneously, and apart, and if I knew that Court was fighting a battle, did he, too, sense mine? Did it have anything to do with his coming back to life again? For he is here, I am no longer living with a marble image. And I will never know why. Court being Court I can never ask him why; we wrestled with our problems alone and we must live alone with the answers. And is it part of a marriage, part of being a human being, that we must always reach our decisions alone?

The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

You matter. You are. Be.

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

Meg took a batch of forks from the drawer and turned them over and over, looking at them. "I'm all confused again." "Oh, so 'm I," Calvin said gaily. "But now at least I know we're going somewhere.

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.

All of life is a story

Just a moment," Mrs. Whatsit murmured, and appeared to calculate rapidly upon her fingers. She nodded triumphantly. "Exactly 2,379,152,497 years, 8 months and 3 days.

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

Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.

One of the problems of being a storyteller is the cultivated ability to extrapolate; in every situation all the what ifs come to me.

We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.

An I Q cannot measure artistic ability. A potential Picasso may be a flop at objective vocabulary or number tests. An I Q does not measure a capacity for love ... 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.

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.

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

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.

Flip! Are you all right!" "Paul! Are you all right!" They spoke simultaneously and then they both laughed and Paul came over to the bed and kissed Flip and then stood looking down at her. Flip smiled at him and strangely her eyes filled with tears." "I thought he'd killed you," Paul said. "No, I'm fine, Paul. Are you all right?

The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist
the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

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

If your name isn't known, then it's a very lonely feeling.

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.

I've made myself vulnerable
I've let myself care.
I've opened my firmly closed heart.
My safety is gone
It's no longer there
My protection is falling apart.

Nobody promised
Our hearts would be safe
Or our bodies protected from harm.
A moment can change
All we think that we have,
Hope will endure through the storm.

Troubling a Star
Madeleine L'Engle

Creativity comes from accepting that you're not safe, from being absolutely aware, and from letting go of control. It's a matter of seeing everything - even when you want to shut your eyes.