Madeleine L'Engle Love Quotations

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

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one absolute: God is love.

If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive.

I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.

Agape love is...profound concern for the well-being of another, without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process.

We do not love each other without changing each other.

The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.

what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.

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

We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.

Love is the one surprise.

And I can't say it now. I can't say what I want to say. I hold you-- I-- I clutch you, because I love you so desperately, and time is so short, we have such a little time in which to live and be young, even at best, and I put my arms around you and hold you because I want to love you while I can and I want to know I'm loving you, only it doesn't mean anything because you aren't afraid. You aren't frightened so that you want to clutch it all while you can.