Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.

Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.

I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it.

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.

When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take use all the way.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

Women must be very gentle with men as they, as well as women, seek to regain the lost wholeness for which they were destined.

When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband.

But my memories are like a fire in winter—whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them. —Ditta

Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.

It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.

God understands. And God understands that part of us which is more than we think we are.

Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set 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.

I share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe "is as good as a burnt out candle."

When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.

there are dozens and dozens of ways to be a family ... Family tends to happen.

Their love was a bright flower, youthful and radiantly beautiful.

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

We live by revelations, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget all the questions and we become like the pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men.

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.

Anything that's natural can't be sinful-it may be inconvenient, but it's not sinful.

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.

I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

Growing up is a process that never ends. It isn't a point you attain so you can say, Hooray, I'm grown up. Some people never grow up. And nobody ever finishes growing. Or shouldn't. If you stop you might as well quit. What I have to tell you is that it never gets any easier. It goes right on being rough forever. But nothing that's easy is worth anything. You ought to have learned that by now. What happens as you keep on growing is that all of a sudden you realize that it's more exciting and beautiful than scary and awful.

During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.

Dare I? Of course I don't. But I'm going to anyhow because I have no choice.

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

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."

It was not an end, it was a beginging

If we aren't capable of being hurt we aren't capable of feeling joy.

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children

All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.

The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think.

Only a fool is not afraid.