Madeleine L'Engle quotes - page 9

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. (Madeleine L'Engle)
Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
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. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can't possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
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. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
I think that this scene is upsetting because it calls us beyond fact into the vast world of imagination, and imagination is a word of many dimensions. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
No! andare not the same thing at all! (Madeleine L'Engle)
Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being in joyful rhythm. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.... I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah... Faith is best expressed in story. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
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. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you." View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
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. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
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)
Life is full of questions, and we are free to ask them, to understand, occasionally, that we are not going to get an answer, or at least not the answer we expect, and then we are called to move on. But I believe that God encourages us to ask questions. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
We are not to retreat from life, pinning our hopes on ‘elsewhere.' but to know that we will come to that final destination best by living full here and now, be it through joy, or pain, or a mix of both. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
Faith is for the part of the story that superficially isn't believable. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle
The truth of a story is what the novelist strives for, and quite often the writer is taken down strange and unexpected paths on this search. View quote
Madeleine L'Engle