Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books," Miranda said. "It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.

We tend to think things are new because we've just discovered them.

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it.

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.

Nothing important is completely explicable.

poets are born knowing the language of angels

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

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

Refusing to accept God's love because we're unworthy - of course we're unworthy! - is another golden calf.

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.

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

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

We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

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

A new year can begin only because the old year ends.

If I'm not free to fail, I'm not free to take risks and everything in life that's worth doing involves a willingness to take a risk.

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.

Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.

If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

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.

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.

Das Werk lobt den Meister. (German: The work proves the craftsman.)

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.

I love, therefore I am vulnerable.

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.

In our dreams we are able to fly . . . and that is a remembering of how we were meant to be.

And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.

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

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?

I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.

A life lived in chaos is an impossibility.

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

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.

I do not know everything; still many things I understand.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free.

Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?

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.

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

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

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.