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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

408. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

410. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

419. “In reading we must become creators.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Are anybody’s parents typical?”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

445. “Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.”

— 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. “A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

448. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

450. “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