Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “What happens to what’s happened?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

407. “In reading we must become creators.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

408. “Anything that’s natural can’t be sinful-it may be inconvenient, but it’s not sinful.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

409. “Now wonder our youth is confused and in pain; they long for God, for the transcendent, and they are offered, far too often, either piosity or sociology, neither of which meets their needs, and they are introduced to churches which have become buildings that are a safe place to go to escape the awful demands of God.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

410. “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

411. “What is self-image? Who started talking about one? I rather fancy it was Madison Avenue.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

412. “For me, this book activates both transparency and resistance. It urges us to open ourselves up to those hurts, those tribulations, those disappointments, those doubts, those uncertainties. All of which can be summarized as darkness. It walks us through that pain to a light within ourselves, sparking us to resist all that is not for our good and fight for a better way. Simply put, A Wrinkle in Time offers a glimpse of eternity.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

413. “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

414. “And When is not what matters. It’s what happens in the When that matters.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

415. “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

416. “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

417. “A book comes and says, ‘Write me.’ My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

418. “How did all this happen? Isn’t it wonderful? I feel as though I were just being born! I’m not alone anymore! Do you realize what that means to me?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

419. “Goodness has never been a guarantee of safety.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

420. “I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

421. “It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

422. “There is little character or loveliness in the face of someone who has shunned risk, avoided suffering and rejected life.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

423. “In a reverse way, sharing my mother’s long, slow dying consumes my creative energy. I manage one angry and bitter story, and feel better for it, but most of me is involved in Mother’s battle. Watching her slowly being snuffed out is the opposite of pregnancy, depleting instead of fulfilling: I am exhausted by conflict.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

424. “Again Mrs Which’s voice reverberated through the cave. “Therre willl nno llonggerr bee sso manyy pplleasanntt thinggss too llookk att iff rressponssible ppeoplle ddo nnott ddoo ssomethingg abboutt thee unnppleassanntt oness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

425. “The writing of a book may be a solitary business, it is done alone. The writer sits down with paper and pen, or typewriter, and, withdrawn from the world, tries to set down the story that is crying to be written. 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

426. “And as long as there are even a few who belong to the Old Music, you are still our brothers and sisters.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

427. “Let’s not worry about next year till we get through this one,” Mrs. Murry said. “More French toast, boys?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

428. “That’s a sure way to tell about somebody – the way they play, or don’t play, make-believe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

429. “There’s something wrong about trying to heal with a surgeon’s knife.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

430. “It was still twilight when they reached the flat rock. They sat, and the stone still held the warmth of the day’s sun. At first there were only occasional sparkles, but as it got darker Chuck was lost in a daze pf delight as a galaxy of fireflies twinkled on and off, flinging upward in a blaze of light, dropping earthward like falling stars, moving in contiuous effervescent dance.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

431. “Maybe the theatre isn’t any place for a reasonable human being after all. It keeps your emotions in such a constant state of upheaval. It’s really terribly wearing. I wonder if I could stand it, one emotional upset after the other just going on and on for the rest of my life.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

433. “The stones do not tell us what is going to happen, or what we are to do, any more than the stars. They speak to us only of our present position in the great pattern. Where we are now; here. Sometimes that helps us to see the pattern more clearly. That is all.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

434. “We cannot always cry at the right time and who is to say which time is right?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

435. “But as she had felt she was beyond fear, so now she was beyond screaming.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

436. “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

437. “No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

438. “When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this – and out of nothing – can still count the hairs of my head.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

439. “Severe illness isolates those in close contact with it, because it inevitably narrows the focus of concern. To a certain extent this can lead to healing, but not if the circle of concern is so tight that it cannot be broken into, or out of.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

440. “One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

441. “What can we give a child when there is nothing left?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

442. “We know you have a great mind and all, Mother, but you don’t have much sense.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

443. “You learn to write by doing it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

444. “The stars do not foretell, because what has not happened must be free to happen, as it will.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

445. “There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly’.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

446. “But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

447. “When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

448. “Are anybody’s parents typical?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

449. “She screamed out... and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

450. “Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general.”

— Madeleine L'Engle