Quotes by Madeleine L'Engle

Why does anybody do anything? Mimi asked impatiently. Most of the time we dont know--any of us.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.-Aunt Beast

Therere a lot of things you dont understand. Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didnt seem worth it. It wasnt you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Mas death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it

Meg’s eyes were too bright. “I wish human beings couldn’t have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.

Hate hurts the hater moren the hated.

Hate is like cancer, separate from the normal cells, devouring and not being nourished, annihilating itself along with everything it attacks.

From the shoulders, slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry. Calvin fell to his knees. No, Mrs. Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs. Whatsits voice. Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.

She was silent; the great wings almost stopped moving; only a delicate stirring seemed to keep them aloft. Listen, then, Mrs. Whatsit said. The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt that she could almost reach out and touch them: Sing unto the Lord a new song, and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that there is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord!

We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. Weve come to the point where its irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves havent yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we dont look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.

Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesnt. He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other. That was surely the purest kind of thing.Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.

Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethans used um and er the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: You know. We interject you know meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence.

Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this — and out of nothing — can still count the hairs of my head.

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers...To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy...If I try self consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals

we’re all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can’t tell which is which

A book, too, can be a star explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.