Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.

Charles Wallace, the danger here is greatest for you. Why? Because of what you are. Just exactly because of what you are you will be by far the most vulnerable. You must stay with Meg and Calvin. You must not go off on your own. Beware of pride and arrogance, Charles, for they may betray you.

I heard a man of brilliance cry out that God has withdrawn from nations when they have turned from Him, and surely we are astiff-necked people; why should He not withdraw? But then I remember Jonah accusing God of overlenience, of foolishness, mercy, and compassion. We desperately need the foolishness of God. (233)

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

As a child, when I came across a word I didn't know, I didn't stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.

And we mustn't lose our sense of humor, Mrs. Which said. The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love. That's how it works best.

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

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

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

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

I wish human beings couldn't have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

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

There're a lot of things you don't understand. Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma's death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it

Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.

Lords of fire and earth and water, Lords of moon and wind and sky, Come now to the Old Man's daughter, Come from fathers long gone by. Bring blue from a distance eye. Lords of water, earth, and fire, Lords of wind and snow and rain, Give to my heart's desire. Life as all life comes with pain, But blue will come to us again.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation

But his love is greater than all our hate and he will not rest until Judas has turned to him, until Satan has turned to him, until dark has turned to him; until we can all, all of us without exception, freely return his look of love with love in our own eyes and hearts. And then, healed, whole, complete but not finished, we swill know the joy of being co-creators with the one to whom we call. Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus.

resulting in the appearance in the offspring of a character which is not present in the parents but which is potentially transmissible to its offspring.

We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even changes that which we so zealously think we know.

If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody, and you're stuck with it.