Quotes by Madeleine L'Engle

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that ones life would not make sense if God did not exist.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they dont have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

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.

I have advice for people who want to write. I dont care whether theyre 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to 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. And second, you need to read. You cant be a writer if youre not a reader. Its the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if its for only half an hour — write, write, write.

Its not my brain thats writing the book, its these hands of mine.

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command....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. And the artist either says, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and willingly becomes the bearer of teh work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her childs creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

A book comes and says, Write me.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even changes that which we so zealously think we know.

People are afraid of knowledge that is not yet theirs.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

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

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

Mr Jenkins. Unique, as every star in the sky is unique, every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every farandola, every cherubim, unique: Named.

Who makes you least confused?Calvin There was no hesitation here. When Im with Calvin, I dont mind being meYou mean he makes you more you, dont you?I guess you could put it that way.

People are more than just the way they look.

In my dreams, I never have an age.