Madeleine L'Engle Quotations

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

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.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

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

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

Be aware that rigidity imprisons.

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.

You learn to write by doing it.

Only Christ can free us from the prison of legalism, and then only if we are willing to be freed.

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught. What a teacher can do... in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

To be alive is to be vulnerable.

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

To be a witness means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has view.

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

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

I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art is not a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings.

I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.

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

I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about.

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

If you want to write . . . keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

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.

The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

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.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation. . . works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter. . . The offerings of creation. . . our glimpses of truth.

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."

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.

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.

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.

Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might.

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

As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

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.

I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.

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

Are anybody's parents typical?

To grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable.

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

The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

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?

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."

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

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.

Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.

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.

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

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

When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.

prayer is whenever we consciously try to get in contact with the numinous, the ineffable, the marvelous.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers.

Language changes. If it does not change, like Latin it dies. But we need to be aware that as our language changes, so does our theology change, particularly if we are trying to manipulate language for a specific purpose. That is what is happening with our attempts at inclusive language, which thus far have been inconclusive and unsuccessful.

To refuse to respond is in itself a response.

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.

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.

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

We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.

The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.

The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.

When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.

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.

The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.

A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is . It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.

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

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

Don't keep putting your anger off. Until you go through it, you can't get out of it.

Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.

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.

We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

Because we fail to listen to each other's stories, we are becoming a fragmented human race.

But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

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.

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.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.

Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.