Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

357. “Think of the person you love the most in the world. Do you really see them visually? Or don’t you see on a much deeper level? It’s lots easier to visualize people we don’t know very well.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

358. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

361. “It’s my worst trouble, getting fond. If I didn’t get fond I could be happy all the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

362. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

377. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Book Quotes

380. “I can’t do it for love of God, like Tom Tallis, or for heaven’s sake, as Mr. Frost said. But because I love people I have to act according to it – to the fact that I love them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

381. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

385. “I am a mere unicorn.” Gaudior dropped his silver lashes modestly.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

386. “It isn’t just in distant galaxies that strange, unreasonable things are happening. Unreason has crept up on us so insidiously that we’ve hardly been aware of it. But think of the things going on in our own country which you wouldn’t have believed possible only a few years ago.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

387. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

391. “Yet there are times when for no logical reason I feel an almost unbearable sense of isolation. Not only am I divided in myself, my underwater and above-water selves separated, but I feel wrenched away from everybody around me. This is part of being human, this knowing that we are all part of one another, inextricably involved; and at the same time alone, irrevocably alone.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

392. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

395. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

398. “The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

399. “She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.”

— 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