Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It’s my worst trouble, getting fond. If I didn’t get fond I could be happy all the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

356. “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

357. “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

358. “One definition of hell is having your own way all the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

359. “I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

360. “Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

361. “Just relax and don’t worry over things that needn’t trouble you,” Mrs Whatsit said.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

362. “You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

363. “A great painting or symphony or play, doesn’t diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe...”

— Madeleine L'Engle

364. “One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

365. “It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

366. “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

367. “Give the public the ‘image’ of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

368. “Just a moment,” Mrs. Whatsit murmured, and appeared to calculate rapidly upon her fingers. She nodded triumphantly. “Exactly 2,379,152,497 years, 8 months and 3 days.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

369. “We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even changes that which we so zealously think we know.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

370. “I do hope I wasn’t born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated human host on a lonely planet like yours.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

371. “More personally, my intellect is a stumbling block to much that makes life worth living: laughter, love; a wiling acceptance of being created. The rational intellect doesn’t have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn’t have a great deal to do with art.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

372. “If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

373. “And there’s no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

374. “All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

375. “Nothing really important in life is in the realm of provable fact.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

376. “Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

377. “Only Christ can free us from the prison of legalism, and then only if we are willing to be freed.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

378. “With our human limitations we’re not always able to understand the explanations.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

379. “There always have been and there always will be people who have been corrupted into enjoying any excuse for cruelty.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

380. “Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves...”

— Madeleine L'Engle

381. “God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

382. “We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We’ve come to the point where it’s irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven’t yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don’t look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

383. “Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

384. “She felt that she was being measured and found wanting.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

385. “We are the called according to His purpose, and whom He calls, them He also justifies. Of course we have help, and without help it would be much more difficult.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

386. “When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

387. “We have to make decisions, and we can’t make them if they’re based on fear.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

388. “Do you know how lucky you are?” She smiled rather wryly. “Not most of the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

389. “To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

390. “A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

391. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

392. “I found myself earnestly explaining to the young minister that I did not believe in God, ’but I’ve discovered that I can’t live as though I didn’t believe in him. As long as I don’t need to say any more than that I try to live as though I believe in God, I would very much like to come to church – if you’ll let me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

393. “No, it was not anger, it was loathing; it was hatred, sheer and unadulterated, and as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

394. “A book, too, can be a star ’explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

395. “I know writers who write only when inspiration comes. How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it? He would be lousy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

396. “I can’t think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as education experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

397. “Oh, my darling you are not dumb,” her father answered. “You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

398. “Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

399. “We must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

400. “So I know, with a sense of responsibility that hits me with a cold fist in the pit of my stomach, that what I am is going to make more difference to my own children and those I talk to and teach than anything I tell them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle