Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

404. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

418. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

423. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

431. “In reading we must become creators.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Reading Quotes

432. “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

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. “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

435. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

442. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

445. “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

446. “Her father said, “You know, my dears, the world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.” “Even at a time like this?” Meg asked. The call from Calvin, the sound of her husband’s voice, had nearly broken her control. “Especially at a time like this,” her mother said gently.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

447. “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

448. “But what is real? In the Bible we are constantly being given glimpses of a reality quite different from that taught in school, even in Sunday school. And these glimpses are not given to the qualified; there’s the marvel. It may be that the qualified feel no need of them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

449. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

450. “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