Madeleine L'Engle quotes

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. (Madeleine L'Engle)
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.
Madeleine L'Engle
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.
Madeleine L'Engle
It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.
Madeleine L'Engle
Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
Madeleine L'Engle
Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light.
Madeleine L'Engle
Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.
Madeleine L'Engle
That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.
Madeleine L'Engle
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
Madeleine L'Engle
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.
Madeleine L'Engle
Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling. (Madeleine L'Engle)
Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit.
Madeleine L'Engle
Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.
Madeleine L'Engle
It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.
Madeleine L'Engle
If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.
Madeleine L'Engle
If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.
Madeleine L'Engle
We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast.
Madeleine L'Engle
Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.
Madeleine L'Engle
But my memories are like a fire in winter-whenever I'm cold I can warm my hands at them. -Ditta.
Madeleine L'Engle
It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.
Madeleine L'Engle
Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious. (Madeleine L'Engle)
Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.
Madeleine L'Engle
I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.
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 one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.
Madeleine L'Engle
A book comes and says, 'Write me.
Madeleine L'Engle