Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

It is the nature of love to create, and no matter what we do to creation, that love is still there, creating; in the young man who is holding his jacket closed across his chest; in you; in me.

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.

embracing her now would have been like trying to hug a sunbeam

He's nothing but a deformed emanation of energy.

Children are less easily frightened than we are.... they all understand princesses, of course. Haven't they all been badly bruised by peas?

All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men remain silent and do nothing.

Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?" "I give up. Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?" "Professional courtesy.

When things are crazy, her grandfather said, dogs are a reminder of sanity.

I'm too young and the world is too old

We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethans used "um" and "er" the way we do?

Why is it, she wondered, that things that hurt people make them deeper and more understanding?

What you think is not the point. What you do is what's going to count.

Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.

I was filled with anxiety that something might happen to him while we were far from home. I did not voice my fear or write about them in my journal, because that would have given them a reality I desperately desired to avoid

O God, here, as so often, I cannot help. Let me not forget she is your child and your concern makes mine as nothing.

the climax of their journey is a showdown with IT, the cold and calculating disembodied intelligence that has cast a black shadow over the universe in its quest to make everyone behave and believe the same.

We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a sense of family, of belonging to each other. No wonder our kids are struggling to start communes.

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, set 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.

One definition of hell is having your own way all the time.

The well-intentioned mothers who don't want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.

The complete, the true Mrs Whatsit, Meg realized, was beyond human understanding. What she saw was only the game Mrs Whatsit was playing; it was an amusing and charming game, a game full of both laughter and comfort, but it was only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs Whatsit could be.

But I have to accept the fact that I am often unwise; that I am not always loving; that I make mistakes; that I am, in fact, human. And as Christians we are not meant to be less human than other people, but more human, just as Jesus of Nazareth was more human.

We want nothing from you that you do without grace," Mrs Whatsit said, "or that you do without understanding.

Just a moment, Mrs. Whatsit murmured, and appeared to calculate rapidly upon her fingers. She nodded triumphantly. Exactly 2,379,152,497 years, 8 months and 3 days.