Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

202. “An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

203. “Friends – or lovers – are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

204. “I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death’s inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

205. “There are times when I feel that he has withdrawn from me, and I have often given him cause, but Easter is always the answer to My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”

— Madeleine L'Engle

206. “All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

207. “Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

208. “If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

209. “There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises. Even little ones, like your cooking stew over your Bunsen burner. You may be in the middle of an experiment, but you still remember to feed your family. That’s enough to keep my heart optimistic, no matter how pessimistic my mind. And you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

210. “It really helped ever so much because it made me mad, and when I’m mad I don’t have room to be scared.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

211. “Come t’e’ picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!”

— Madeleine L'Engle

212. “Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

213. “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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

214. “He said, “There’s a sermon of John Donne’s I have often had cause to remember during my lifetime. He says, Other men’s crosses are not my crosses. We all have our own cross to carry, and one is all most of us are able to bear. How much do you owe him, Vicky?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

215. “It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious “impossible” which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

216. “Hate is like cancer, separate from the normal cells, devouring and not being nourished, annihilating itself along with everything it attacks.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

217. “I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

218. “Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that “the people” do no want freedom.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

219. “Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

220. “If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

221. “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. It stops us from taking anything for granted. It has also taught me about living in the immediate moment.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

222. “Curled up on one of her pillows a gray fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head under again, and went back to sleep.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

223. “I don’t know if they’re really like everybody else, or if they’re able to pretend they are.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

224. “It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

225. “We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

226. “To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

227. “When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

228. “Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

229. “And we mustn’t lose our sense of humor,” Mrs. Which said. “The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

231. “If we allow our “high creativity” to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

232. “Refusing to accept God’s love because we’re unworthy – of course we’re unworthy! – is another golden calf.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

233. “All will be redeemed in God’s fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

234. “Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It’s no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. 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

235. “There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

236. “Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

237. “We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn’t need defending.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

238. “I feel as though I’m not breathing when I’m out of his presence. He’s the oxygen in my air, the sun in my universe, the staff of my life. – Jane Gardiner.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

239. “Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

240. “Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

241. “There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

242. “If we aren’t capable of being hurt we aren’t capable of feeling joy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

243. “Mr Jenkins. Unique, as every star in the sky is unique, every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every farandola, every cherubim, unique: Named.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

244. “If we don’t pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

245. “I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

246. “My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

247. “It is the nature of love to create. It is the nature of hate to destroy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

248. “The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it’s far less mind boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

249. “That’s something I’ve noticed about food: whenever there’s a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

250. “Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.”

— Madeleine L'Engle