Madeleine L'engle Quotes

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group...If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed. Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth.

~ Madeleine L'engle

... scar tissue was the strongest tissue in the human body.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts...

~ Madeleine L'engle

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

~ Madeleine L'engle

If we allow our high creativity to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song.

~ Madeleine L'engle

In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Very few of us understand Honorable Bird, except to acknowledge that without his power and grace nothing would be written, painted, or composed at all. To say anything beyond this about the creative process is like pulling all the petals off a flower in order to analyze it, and ending up having destroyed the flower.

~ Madeleine L'engle

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.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Believing takes practice.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don’t forget that he never promised he’d say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing . . . . That he cares . . . That is all. Nothing else.

~ Madeleine L'engle

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things, the word about being.

~ Madeleine L'engle

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.

~ Madeleine L'engle

One foggy night I was walking the dogs down the lane and heard the geese, very close overhead, calling, calling, their marvellous strange cry, as they flew by. I think that is what our own best prayer must sound like when we send it up to heaven.

~ Madeleine L'engle

If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Lords of melody and song,Lords of roses burning bright,Blue will right the ancient wrong,Though the way is dark and long,Blue will shine with loving light.

~ Madeleine L'engle

We draw people to Christ not 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.

~ Madeleine L'engle

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

~ Madeleine L'engle

... Papa's always had the ability to remember the good things and let the bad ones go. Not a bad ability.... I'm not sure. I think we have to remember it all before we can forgive it.

~ Madeleine L'engle

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.

~ Madeleine L'engle

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

~ Madeleine L'engle

In your language you have a form of poetry called a sonnet...It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not?...There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?...And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?''No.''But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn't he?''Yes. Calvin nodded again.'So,' said Mrs. Whatsit.'So what?''Oh, do not be stupid, boy!' Mrs. Whatsit scolded. 'You know perfectly well what I am driving at!''You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but with freedom within it?''Yes,' Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

~ Madeleine L'engle

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure...

~ Madeleine L'engle

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Women in Jesus' day were less than second-class citizens.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Jesus, who comes across in the Gospels as extraordinarily strong, begged in the garden, with drops of sweat like blood running down his face, that he might be spared the terrible cup ahead of him, the betrayal and abandonment by his friends, death on the cross. Because Jesus cried out in anguish, we may too. But our fear is less frequent and infinitely less if we are close to the Creator. Jesus, having cried out, then let his fear go, and moved on.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular, it is never general.

~ Madeleine L'engle

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

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything.... It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.

~ Madeleine L'engle

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would NOT make everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of the master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God's ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.

~ Madeleine L'engle

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.

~ Madeleine L'engle

I hate it! Charles Wallace cried passionately. I hate the Dark Thing!

~ Madeleine L'engle

It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!

~ Madeleine L'engle

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

~ Madeleine L'engle