Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “We have to make decisions, and we can’t make them if they’re based on fear.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

402. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

421. “In reading we must become creators.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Reading Quotes

422. “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

423. “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

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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

429. “The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

434. “As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

435. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

440. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

442. “That’s quite something, to be loved by someone like Mrs Whatsit.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— 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. “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

446. “With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

447. “Are anybody’s parents typical?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

449. “She knew that the freedom was in herself, just as the prison had been.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle