Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.

Only a fool is not afraid.

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

We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about, Charles Wallace said. Why should I disillusion them?

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space. Oh, the thin beast said. Aren't they lonely?

We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast

It's a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them--and they simply don't need you. That's all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on--this desperate need--and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.

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.

A book, too, can be a star, "explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly," a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.