Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

252. “In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

253. “A life lived in chaos is an impossibility.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

254. “My daughter, I am not a Mrs Whatsit, a Mrs Who, or a Mrs Which. Yes, Calvin has told me everything he could. I am a human being, and a very fallible one. But I agree with Calvin. We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

256. “If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

257. “Wherever she was, holy laughter was present to heal and redeem.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

258. “Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses’s vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

259. “If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it? I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

260. “It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

261. “You’re much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren’t,” Mrs. Murry said.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

262. “Many waters cannot quench love,′ she whispered. ‘Neither can floods drown it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

263. “A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

264. “Dare I? Of course I don’t. But I’m going to anyhow because I have no choice.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

265. “God doesn’t stop the bad things from happening; that’s never been part of the promise. The promise is: I am with you. I am with you now until the end of time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

266. “I suppose that depends on how you look at it,” Meg said. “Usually no matter what happens people think it’s my fault, even if I have nothing to do with it at all. But I’m sorry I tried to fight him. It’s just been an awful week. And I’m full of bad feeling.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

267. “Oh, why must you make me look at unpleasant things when there are so many delightful ones to see?” Again Mrs Which’s voice reverberated through the cave. “Therre willl nno llonggerr bee sso many y pplleasanntt thinggss tto llookk att iff rressponssible ppeoplle ddo nnott ddo ssomethingg abboutt thee unnppleassanntt oness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

268. “You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

269. “Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

270. “There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

271. “But I love her. That’s the funny part of it. I love them all, and they don’t give a hoot about me. Maybe that’s why I call when I’m not going to be home. Because I care. Nobody else does. You don’t know how lucky you are to be loved.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

272. “Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These 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.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

273. “The complete, the true Mrs Whatsit, Meg realized, was beyond human understanding. What she saw was only the game Mrs Whatsit was playing; it was an amusing and charming game, a game full of both laughter and comfort, but it was only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs Whatsit could be.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

274. “I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.””

— Madeleine L'Engle

275. “Charles Wallace and the unicorn moved through the time-spinning reaches of a far glazy, and he realized that the galaxy itself was part of a mighty orchestra, and each star and planet within the galaxy added its own instrument to the music of the spheres. As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

276. “Time is inextricably tangled up with place, and can be measured only against place. Time has meaning only in relation to its position in space, the movement of a planet about a sun, of a night through stars.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

277. “Very few of us understand Honorable Bird, except to acknowledge that without his power and grace nothing would be written, painted, or composed at all. To say anything beyond this about the creative process is like pulling all the petals off a flower in order to analyze it, and ending up having destroyed the flower.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

278. “We are all broken, we human creatures, and to pretend we’re not is to inhibit healing.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

279. “The lines of love cross time and space.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

280. “Like all great fantasists, he has taught me about life, life in eternity rather than chronology, life in that time in which we are real.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

281. “In my tadpole stage I was delivered to Metron Ariston and transmogrified, and here am I. My name is Sporos, by the way, and I do not like your thinking names like mouse-creature and shrimp-thing at me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

282. “We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

283. “But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

284. “Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can’t be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

285. “Meg, when people don’t know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

286. “It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God’s name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don’t believe in him.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

287. “And joy is always a promise.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

288. “The very young woman can be charming and delightful and pretty but only a mature woman can be beautiful; and only a mature man can be strong enough to be tender.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

289. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’... I am grateful that Jesus cried out those words, because it means that I need never fear to cry them out myself. I need never fear, nor feel any sense of guilt, during the inevitable moments of forsakenness. They come to us all. They are part of the soul’s growth.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

290. “Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share – he cannot help it – what he has found.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

291. “Don’t worry about Charles Wallace, Meg,” her father had once told her. Meg remembered it very clearly because it was shortly before he went away. “There’s nothing the matter with his mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

292. “Oh, Meg, you are a moron,” Calvin said. “Don’t you know you’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me in a long time?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

293. “If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

294. “Sometimes when we aren’t looking, the holiness comes breaking through like a rainbow.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

295. “If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free...”

— Madeleine L'Engle

296. “You don’t want him for a reason. You want him because he’s your father.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

297. “Look at my glasses. I can’t even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it’s not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it’s me, Madeleine. I don’t think Father’s eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn’t thinking, but a brain’s just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

298. “The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and quirks are both as individual as a finger-print and as universal as an open hand.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

299. “Basically there can be no categories such as ‘religious’ art and ‘secular’ art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore ’religious.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

300. “All teachers must face the fact that they are potential points of reference. The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we are, we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our own points of reference to show us the way.”

— Madeleine L'Engle