Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

307. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

321. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

326. “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

327. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

332. “You might call IT the Boss.” Then Charles Wallace giggled, a giggle that was the most sinister sound Meg had ever heard. “IT sometimes calls ITself the Happiest Sadist.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

341. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

343. “The prayer of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God as something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

344. “Love is the one surprise.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

346. “I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

350. “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