Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

Have you ever thought about time? The continuum that connects the dust of the ancients to the pollen that lands on our noses? Have you ever looked and thought...that thing needs a wrinkle in it?

If we knew ahead of time what was going to happen we'd be -- we'd be like the people on Camazotz, with no lives of our own, with everything all planned and done for us.

Our children... have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, If a [man's] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Why can't I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?

A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.

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

We are all strangers in a strange land.

I suppose that depends on how you look at it," Meg said. "Usually no matter what happens people think it's my fault, even if I have nothing to do with it at all. But I'm sorry I tried to fight him. It's just been an awful week. And I'm full of bad feeling.

In my tadpole stage I was delivered to Metron Ariston and transmogrified, and here am I. My name is Sporos, by the way, and I do not like your thinking names like mouse-creature and shrimp-thing at me.

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God (as did the men of the Christian establishment of Galileo's day), then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God.

Remember, he hasn't much imagination. Or, rather, it's been frozen for a long while and hasn't had time to thaw.

Not so much of dying, if—I'm afraid of annihilation. Of not being.

All teachers must face the fact that they are potential points of reference. 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.

What would I be singing, Vicky wondered,—if I sang out my moods?

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.

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

William Langland, writing around 1400, said, 'And all the wickedness in the world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea.

All I knew was that at almost fifteen it's very difficult to be satisfied with the age you are, because you aren't really any age.

I do hope I wasn't born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated human host on a lonely planet like yours.

your behaviour must be such that when you go to bed at night you will be happy with what you have done during the day

That joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.

Strangely, as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians, I don't ever remember hearing the word sacred as its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly. Clean and safe. How puny those words are. What a pitiful reduction of the grandeur of the created world and its inhabitants. What a sad commentary on the church's understanding of the God of the universe.