Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “If a book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

302. “The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

303. “Perhaps one of the most compelling and moving descriptions of that internal battle comes near the end of the book, when Mrs Whatsit tells the children that life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: “You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

304. “I believe that consistently we need to look for good, and not for evil, that when we look for evil we call up evil, while heaven comes closer when we acknowledge it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

305. “When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

306. “The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

307. “There’s nothing more physically exhausting than a sense of failure.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

308. “I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

309. “You’ve got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

310. “Maybe you have to know the darkness to truly appreciate the light.” – Madeleine L’Engle.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

311. “If I’m confused, or upset, or angry, if I can go out and look at the stars I’ll almost always get back a sense of proportion. It’s not that they make me feel insignificant; it’s the very opposite; they make me feel that everything matters, be it ever so small, and that there’s meaning to life even when it seems most meaningless.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

312. “But human beings need Deepening Places, too. And far too many never have any.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

313. “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

314. “Our sins defeat us unless we are willing to recognize them, confess them, and so become healed and whole and holy – not qualified, mind you; just holy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

315. “In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

316. “We don’t have to know everything at once. We just do one thing at a time, as it is given us to do.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

317. “I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

318. “To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

319. “But there’s a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There’s a kind of vanity in goodness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

320. “We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

321. “I hope that I will never forget the salvific power of joyful laughter.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

322. “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything... It is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

323. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

324. “You’re going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

325. “It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!”

— Madeleine L'Engle

326. “I looked at this tiny, perfect creature and it was as though a light switch had been turned on. A great rush of love flooded out of me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

327. “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has obtained liberation from self.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

328. “If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

329. “We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

330. “Yes! I dare disturb the universe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

331. “I like to understand things,” Meg said. “We all do. But it isn’t always possible.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

332. “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 it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That’s all I know, kid. I’m not holding anything back. Maybe it’s because I’m supposed to meet you. You tell me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

333. “The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness. Picasso says that an artist 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

334. “In my dreams, I never have an age.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

335. “An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

336. “Okay, Polly,” her grandfather said. “Let’s have some normal, ordinary lesson time. What is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

337. “For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God’s purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

338. “The name of God is so awe-full, so unpronounceable, that it has never been used by any of his creatures. Indeed, it is said that if, inadvertently, the great and terrible name of God should be spoken, the universe would explode.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

339. “The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

340. “This wasn’t the first time that I’d come close to death, but it was the first time I’d been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you’ve loved.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

341. “But our fear and our rejection does not take away from truth, and truth is what the Bible instructs us to know in order that we may be free.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

342. “Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?” “I give up. Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?” “Professional courtesy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

343. “Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

344. “It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them – and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on – this desperate need – and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

345. “Sure, go ahead.” Calvin fished in his pocket and pulled out a wad of folded paper. “As a matter of fact, I have some junk of mine to finish up. Math. That’s one thing I have a hard time keeping up in. I’m okay on anything to do with words, but I don’t do as well with numbers.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

346. “A book comes and says, ‘Write me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

347. “We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

348. “Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would NOT make everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of the master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God’s ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

349. “All right, all right, you go right on thinking you an act of God created in his image, and I’ll go right on thinking I’m descended from an ape. When you look in the mirror I should think you’d feel pretty discouraged; I wouldn’t be happy to look at myself and think that my faces is an Imago Dei. It wouldn’t make me feel I’d done very well by God. But when I look in the mirror and that I’m descended from an ape, I feel I’ve done remarkably well.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

350. “It hasn’t happened yet, nuclear war. No missiles have been sent. As long as it hasn’t happened, there’s a chance that it may not happen.”

— Madeleine L'Engle