Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

On the other side of pain, there is still love.

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

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 which are not seen are eternal.

Art is communication.

Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Progo,' Meg asked. 'You memorized the names of all the stars - how many are there?' How many? Great heavens, earthling. I haven't the faintest idea.' But you said your last assignment was to memorize the names of all of them.' I did. All the stars in all the galaxies. And that's a great many.' But how many?' What difference does it make? I know their names. I don't know how many there are. It's their names that matter.

If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them. —Ditta

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.

Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, It's my own business.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

Itt iss Eevill… What is going to happen? Wee wwill cconnttinnue tto ffightt!… And we're not alone, you know, children, came Mrs.Whatsit, the comforter. …some of the best fighters have come from your own planet… Who have our fighters been? Calvin asked. Oh, you must know them, dear, Mrs.Whatsit said. Mrs.Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Nothing, no one, is too small to matter. What you do is going to make a difference.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.

You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.