Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “If a book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

324. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “Accepting that we are angry is a healthy and appropriate response as long as we don’t get stuck in it. Acknowledging it is one way of going through it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

346. “Love is the one surprise.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

347. “We human beings grow through our failures, not our virtues.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

348. “When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

349. “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

350. “Ach,′ she heard someone saying, ‘I left mein ceinture dans le shower ce morgen. Quelle dope ich bin!”

— Madeleine L'Engle