Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

152. “Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

153. “It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

154. “It was not an end, it was a beginging.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

155. “There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

156. “So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

157. “She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

158. “Women must be very gentle with men as they, as well as women, seek to regain the lost wholeness for which they were destined.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

159. “I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

160. “Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

161. “I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming – making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate. That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

162. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

163. “Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

164. “Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

166. “We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

167. “Their love was a bright flower, youthful and radiantly beautiful.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

168. “Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

169. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

170. “Do you think things always have an explanation? “Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we’re not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

171. “That was surely the purest kind of kything. Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

172. “The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

173. “If you accept any position of authority you have to know when to break or circumvent a rule. It’s the knowing when that’s important.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

174. “If you’re too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

175. “Remember, he hasn’t much imagination. Or, rather, it’s been frozen for a long while and hasn’t had time to thaw.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

176. “To refuse to respond is in itself a response.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

177. “But if Hugh dies first, would I ever be able to stop saying, “we” and say “I”? I doubt it. I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are “we” and “us,” a new creature born of the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive “we” remains. And most growth has come during times of trial.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

178. “You must understand with your hearts. With the whole of yourselves, not just a fragment.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

179. “My protagonists, male and female, are me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

180. “When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can’t explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn’t happen very often. But I obey.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

181. “We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

182. “I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

183. “The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

184. “Love, she insisted, is not power, which she considered always coercive. 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

185. “You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling? A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

186. “Maybe I don’t like being different,” Meg said. “but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

187. “But my memories are like a fire in winter – whenever I’m cold I can warm my hands at them. – Ditta.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

188. “Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

189. “The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

190. “An old ass knows more than a young colt.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

191. “No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I’ve been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

192. “On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems. You know that, don’t you, dear sister?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

193. “Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

195. “Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

196. “I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

197. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

198. “Like and equal are two entirely different things.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

199. “In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

200. “Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.”

— Madeleine L'Engle