Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

452. “I am a mere unicorn.” Gaudior dropped his silver lashes modestly.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

453. “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

454. “But what is real? In the Bible we are constantly being given glimpses of a reality quite different from that taught in school, even in Sunday school. And these glimpses are not given to the qualified; there’s the marvel. It may be that the qualified feel no need of them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

455. “One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

456. “The stars do not foretell, because what has not happened must be free to happen, as it will.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

457. “IT was the most horrible, the most repellent thing she had ever seen, far more nauseating then anything she had ever imagined with her consious mind, or that had ever tormented her in her most terrible nightmares.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

458. “The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

460. “There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly’.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

461. “He’s nothing but a deformed emanation of energy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

462. “Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

463. “If I didn’t get fond I could be happy all the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

464. “People like me spend years learning the techniques of meditation. But you’re a poet, and poets are born knowing the language of angels.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

465. “The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

466. “As a child, when I came across a word I didn’t know, I didn’t stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

467. “God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

468. “We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

469. “Somehow or other, the loving parents had swallowed one of the Tempter’s hooks, and the child was given total self-indulgence, which is far from free will. He still tempts. The ancient, primordial battle to destroy Community, to shatter Trinity, still continues. Creation still groans with the pain of it. Like it or not, we’re caught in the middle.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

470. “We do not 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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

471. “You matter. You are. Be.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

472. “There is nothing we need be afraid to say before the Lord.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

474. “Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers – ugly. No! I don’t want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

475. “I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don’t have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

476. “Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

477. “I heard a doctor say that the living tend to withdraw emotionally from the dying, thereby driving them deeper into isolation. Not to withdraw takes tremendous strength. To pull back is a temptation; it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as remaining open.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

478. “We, and I think I’m speaking for many writers, don’t know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don’t that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn’t work that way. When the magic comes, it’s a gift.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

479. “The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

480. “If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

482. “Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

483. “And I can’t say it now. I can’t say what I want to say. I hold you – I – I clutch you, because I love you so desperately, and time is so short, we have such a little time in which to live and be young, even at best, and I put my arms around you and hold you because I want to love you while I can and I want to know I’m loving you, only it doesn’t mean anything because you aren’t afraid. You aren’t frightened so that you want to clutch it all while you can.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

484. “This book that defied the categories has now endured for more than half a century, finding new readers in each generation. What is its secret? And what kind of person could produce such a book? Madeleine, c. 1920.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

485. “What can we give a child when there is nothing left? All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

486. “How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I ‘believe’ for two minutes once every month or so, I’m doing well.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

487. “And another lovely paradox: we can be humble only when we know that we are God’s children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

488. “We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

489. “I’m too young and the world is too old.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

490. “On a planet that has given in... you must prepare to be very strong.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

491. “Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

492. “Her father said, “You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.” “Even at a time like this?” Meg asked. The call from Calvin, the sound of her husband’s voice, had nearly broken her control. “Especially at a time like this,” her mother said gently.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

493. “I am slowly coming to understand with all my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

494. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

495. “Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn’t mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one’s own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

496. “It’s not my brain that’s writing the book, it’s these hands of mine.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

497. “Not so much of dying, if – I’m afraid of annihilation. Of not being.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

498. “I cannot find it in me to believe that God enjoys long faces and scowls at merriment.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

499. “What you think is not the point. What you do is what’s going to count.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

500. “There’re a lot of things you don’t understand.” Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. “I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn’t seem worth it. It wasn’t you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma’s death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle