Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

It's a lot simpler to adapt to low gravity, or no atmosphere, or even sandstorms than it is to hustle inhabitants.

You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.

When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

I found myself earnestly explaining to the young minister that I did not believe in God, 'but I've discovered that I can't live as though I didn't believe in him. As long as I don't need to say any more than that I try to live as though I believe in God, I would very much like to come to church--if you'll let me.

The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware.

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. It stops us from taking anything for granted. It has also taught me about living in the immediate moment.

Well, then, someone just tell me how we got here! Calvin's voice was still angry and his freckles seemed to stand out on his face. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take us years and years to get here. Oh we don't travel by the speed of anything, Mrs. Whatsit explained earnestly. We teaser. Or you might say, we wrinkle.

Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.

That was surely the purest kind of kything. Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.

Rules are made for people, not people for rules

Do you think things always have an explanation?" "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Idiot," Proginoskes said, anxiously rather than crossly. "Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

It hasn't happened yet, nuclear war. No missiles have been sent. As long as it hasn't happened, there's a chance that it may not happen.

Ah," she said, "that's ever so much better," and took both boots and shook them out over the sink. "My stomach is full and I'm warm inside and out and it's time I went home.

Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don't forget that he never promised he'd say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing . . . . That he cares . . . That is all. Nothing else.

Tell your sister I'm all right," Mrs Whatsit said to Charles. "Tell her my intentions are good." "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," Charles intoned.

Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity.

Yet there are times when for no logical reason I feel an almost unbearable sense of isolation. Not only am I divided in myself, my underwater and above-water selves separated, but I feel wrenched away from everybody around me. This is part of being human, this knowing that we are all part of one another, inextricably involved; and at the same time alone, irrevocably alone.

It really helped ever so much because it made me mad, and when I'm mad I don't have room to be scared.

Was she strong enough to allow both of them to be themselves? Bahama had instilled in her an honoring of promises, but she could not keep her promise unless she was willing to allow Nik to be Nik, not a projection of someone who could fill in all her empty spaces, heal all her wounds.

The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

We're not peculiar. Oh, yes, you are. Don't you realize that in my world my parents are peculiar because they'd never been divorced? Basically because it would have been too much trouble. But you live in a world where not only are your parents not divorced, they appear to love each other

If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it? I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

Active happiness is not a common state. Active unhappiness is better than dull days. Katherine was seldom in an intermediate stage.