Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Love is the one surprise.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— 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. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

369. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

381. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is. It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

393. “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

394. “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

395. “If God’s peace is in our hearts, we carry it with us, and it can be given to those around us, not by our own will or virtue, but by the Holy Spirit working through us. We cannot give what we do not have, but if the spirit blows through the dark clouds, and enters our hearts, we can be used as vehicles of peace, and our own peace will be thereby deepened. The more peace we give away, the more we have.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

398. “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

399. “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

400. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid.”

— Madeleine L'Engle