Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

The truly great books are flawed: The Brothers Karamazov is unwieldy in structure; a present-day editor would probably want to cut the Grand Inquisitor scene because it isn't necessary to the plot. For me The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels ever written, and this is perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, its human faults.

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

Even travelling at the speed of light it would take us years and years to get here. Oh, we don´t travel at the speed of anything, Mrs Whatsit explained earnestly. We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

From the shoulders, slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry. Calvin fell to his knees. No, Mrs. Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs. Whatsit's voice. Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'...I am grateful that Jesus cried out those words, because it means that I need never fear to cry them out myself. I need never fear, nor feel any sense of guilt, during the inevitable moments of forsakenness. They come to us all. They are part of the soul's growth.

When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can't explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn't happen very often. But I obey it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That's all I know, kid. I'm not holding anything back. Maybe it's because I'm supposed to meet you. You tell me.

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

the joy and love were so tangible that Meg felt that if she only knew where to reach she could touch it with her bare hands.

And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.

One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal.

In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality.

An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

scar tissue was the strongest tissue in the human body.

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.

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.

Think of the person you love the most in the world. Do you really see them visually? Or don't you see on a much deeper level? It's lots easier to visualize people we don't know very well.

The writer whose words are going to be read by children has a heavy responsibility. And yet, despite the undeniable fact that the children's minds are tender, they are also far more tough than many people realize, and they have an openness and an ability to grapple with difficult concepts which many adults have lost. Writers of children's literature are set apart by their willingness to confront difficult questions.

Lords of space and Lords of time, Lords of blessing, Lords of grace, Who is in the warmer clime? Who will follow Madoc's rhyme? Blue will alter time and space.

But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

You must understand with your hearts. With the whole of yourselves, not just a fragment.

For that he was a spirit too delicate To act their earthy and abhorr'd commands, Refusing their grand hests, they did confine him By help of their most potent ministers, And in their most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprisoned, he didst painfully remain. . . . Shakespeare. The Tempest.

All of those who are willing to face the darkness bring the best of themselves to the light, for the world.

All real art is, in its true sense, is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects…Conversely, much great religious art has been written or painted or composed by people who thought they were atheists.