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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

415. “In reading we must become creators.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

416. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

418. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

420. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

422. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

424. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

438. “And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

439. “To write for children at all is an act of faith.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

441. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

450. “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