Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

Let's not worry about next year till we get through this one, Mrs. Murry said. More French toast, boys?

Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go of our sane self-control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the Spirit.

The name of God is so awe-full, so unpronounceable, that it has never been used by any of his creatures. Indeed, it is said that if, inadvertently, the great and terrible name of God should be spoken, the universe would explode.

But our fear and our rejection does not take away from truth, and truth is what the Bible instructs us to know in order that we may be free.

Plato also wrote—and I lettered this in firm italic letters and posted it on my dorm-room door—All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.

we would, all of us, be less than we are if it weren't for those we love and who've loved us who have died.

We don't know what things LOOK like, as you say, the beast said. We know what things ARE like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing.

Qui plus sait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

I know our world isn't perfect, Charles, but it's better than this. This isn't the only alternative! It can't be!" "Nobody suffers here," Charles intoned. "Nobody is ever unhappy." "But nobody's ever happy, either," Meg said earnestly. "Maybe if you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy. Calvin, I want to go home.

But as she had felt she was beyond fear, so now she was beyond screaming.

What I remember from Ruskin is the phrase the cursed animosity of inanimate objects, which I mutter under my breath when I get in a tangle of wire coat hangers. I also wonder if there is any such thing as an inanimate object.

We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.

More personally, my intellect is a stumbling block to much that makes life worth living: laughter, love; a wiling acceptance of being created. The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a candle to see by.

we do not have to understand God's ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all. But we do have to know in the very depths of our being that the ultimate end of the story, no matter how many aeons it takes, is going to be all right.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is part of a healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C.S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul's growth.

How do we teach a child--our own, or those in a classroom--to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have--or need--answers.

One theory I find rather comforting is that time exists so that everything doesn't happen all at once.

But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don't want that kind of God.

Science, literature, art, theology: it is all the same ridiculous, glorious, mysterious language.

A village is very much like boarding school (I was in boarding schools for ten years, so I know whereof I talk): let any threat come from outside, and everybody, old and new, Republican and Democrat, white-collar worker or blue, will band together. Perhaps that is what our divided world needs now: a threat from outside. Certainly, as one good American said, if we do not hang together we will hang separately.

Everything that we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off.