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Madeleine L'Engle
81 quotes
“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), p. 143
“I endeavor To hold the I as one only for the cloud Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed To be responsible. Its light against my face Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place Singing, each compassed by the rest, The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least. It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart, And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join: Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Instruments" in The Weather of the Heart (1978)
“All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Stone for a Pillow (1986), as quoted in If Grace Is True : Why God Will Save Every Person (2003) by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, p. 223
“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…”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005)
“The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dare to be Creative! A Lecture Presented at the Library of Congress (November 16, 1983)
“Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alike and Equal are not the same.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's. And she had her love for them. But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we escape our self-conscious selves.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My husband is my most ruthless critic. … Sometimes he will say, "It's been said better before." Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here we are living in a world of "identity crises," and most of us have no idea what an identity is. Half the problem is that an identity is something which must be understood intuitively, rather than in terms of provable fact. An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way. We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. 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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do we teach a child — our own, or those in a classroom — to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have — or need — answers.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing important is completely explicable.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“St. John said, "And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it ( I need the double meaning here of comprehend). This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take us.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can we give a child when there is nothing left? All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. I don't need to know the difference between a children's book and an adult one; it's the questions that have come from thinking about it that are important. I wish we'd stop finding answers for everything. One of the reasons my generation has mucked up the world to such an extent is our loss of the sense of the mysterious.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise...”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and. . . . For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive. If a friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it should be cut out, and quickly.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source