Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

I've got a sweater." Ben pulled off his coat and held it out for her. "Here." "Thanks, Ben. It's lovely and warm." Then she said, "Ben, I-- I can tell you how I feel about-- about everything. I think you're the best friend I've ever had. I-- I'd lie down and die for you if you wanted me to." "Honey," Ben said. "When I get you to lie down for me it won't be to die.

To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.

It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it's far less mind boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us.

I looked at this tiny, perfect creature and it was as though a light switch had been turned on. A great rush of love flooded out of me.

If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will proudce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

You cannot take credit for your talents. It is what you do with them that counts.

Behind the violence of the birthing of galaxies and stars and planets came a quiet and tender melody, a gentle love song. All the raging of creation, the continuing hydrogen explosions on the countless suns, the heaving of planetary bodies, all was enfolded in a patient, waiting love.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.

To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

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.

We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

As paredes tem ouvidos. (Portuguese: The walls have ears.)

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

When I look at the galaxies on a clear night - when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged . . . I rejoice that I am a part of it.

The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

Wherever she was, holy laughter was present to heal and redeem.

If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.

It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

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

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes...

Sometimes when we aren't looking, the holiness comes breaking through like a rainbow.

the discoveries don't come when you're looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control.

As I listen to the silence, I learn that my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable. 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.

An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world.

What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God's love, a love we don't even have to earn.

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.

In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.

You learn to write by doing it.

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.

Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.

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.

The prayer of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God as something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.

anything that stretches the mind is a help to the potential author.

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.

Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.

The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but . . . what we are meant to be.

We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast