Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It was a dark and stormy night.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

52. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

53. “The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

54. “Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

55. “Wild nights are my glory!”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

57. “Only a fool is not afraid.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

58. “People are more than just the way they look.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

59. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

60. “Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

61. “To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk – not safety and security – that we overcome darkness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

62. “There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

63. “In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

64. “Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

66. “When we make ourselves vulnerable, we do open ourselves to pain, sometimes excruciating pain. The more people we love, the more we are liable to be hurt, and not only by the people we love, but for the people we love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

67. “Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

68. “The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

69. “Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

70. “Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

71. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

72. “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

73. “You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

74. “Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

75. “To be born is to start the journey towards death.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

76. “I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

77. “When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

78. “A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

79. “Man has a viewpoint, but God has the view.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

80. “Reading is a creative activity. You have to visualize the characters, you have to hear what the voices sound like.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

81. “Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

82. “We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

83. “We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

84. “In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

85. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

86. “The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

87. “Easter is always the answer to “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!””

— Madeleine L'Engle

88. “We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

89. “You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

90. “Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

91. “If you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

92. “Art is not a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

93. “To be a witness means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

94. “Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

95. “To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

96. “Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

97. “Because we fail to listen to each other’s stories, we are becoming a fragmented human race.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

98. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

99. “A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

100. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle