Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

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

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

You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.

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

Thou cannot harm a butterfly, without troubling a star.

I know writers who write only when inspiration comes. How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it? He would be lousy.

And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.

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.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

You learn to write by doing it.

What can we give a child when there is nothing left?

I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five and . . . and . . . and . . .

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

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.

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

I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

My protagonists, male and female, are me.

No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover.

Reading is a creative activity. You have to visualize the characters, you have to hear what the voices sound like.

That's a sure way to tell about somebody--the way they play, or don't play, make-believe.

To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

Accepting that we are angry is a healthy and appropriate response as long as we don't get stuck in it. Acknowledging it is one way of going through it.

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.

My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.

It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have.

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

With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.

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

But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?

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

Are anybody's parents typical?

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

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

Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.

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

One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect, and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking.

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?" I do face facts," Meg said. They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.

To refuse to respond is in itself a response.

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

Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.

There's nothing more physically exhausting than a sense of failure.

the artist is not separate from the work and therefore cannot judge it.

Vitam impendere vero. To stake one's life for the truth.

Only a fool is not afraid.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

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

I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive.