Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.

Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.

We are the called according to His purpose, and whom He calls, them He also justifies. Of course we have help, and without help it would be much more difficult.

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?

We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don't understand what we're timing.

Joy is what has made the pain bearable and, in the end, creative rather than destructive.

If you accept any position of authority you have to know when to break or circumvent a rule. It's the knowing when that's important.

Maybe I don't like being different," Meg said, "but I don't want to be like everybody else, either.

The answer has something to do with love. Love that has to go through darkness and pain and endurance and a stark acceptance before it can come out into the far light of the sun.

The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians - because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.

This book that defied the categories has now endured for more than half a century, finding new readers in each generation. What is its secret? And what kind of person could produce such a book? Madeleine, c. 1920

Well, I think you're handsome

What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairy tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

Someone said, 'It's all been done before.' Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.

I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand thinga for them to be.

Maybe you have to know the darkness to truly appreciate the light."—Madeleine L'Engle

So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.

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

And another lovely paradox: we can be humble only when we know that we are God's children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.

There always have been and there always will be people who have been corrupted into enjoying any excuse for cruelty.

Ananda: that joy without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.

My heart believed even when my mind faltered. I listened to my heart and I wrote A Wrinkle in Time as an affirmation that there was indeed light in the darkness with which I was surrounded. I wrote it for God.

There's something wrong about trying to heal with a surgeon's knife.