110+ Madeleine L'Engle Quotes On God, Writing And Imaginative

Madeleine L'Engle was an American novelist best known for her young adult fiction, including the Newbery Award-winning A Wrinkle in Time. She wrote more than 60 books across multiple genres, including science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and poetry. L'Engle's works often explored themes of good versus evil, faith, and the power of love in overcoming obstacles. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Madeleine L'Engle on love, god, writing.

Top 10 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

1. The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
2. Agape love is...profound concern for the well-being of another, without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process.
3. It was a dark and stormy night.
4. A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
5. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.
6. The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.
7. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
8. There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
9. Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, "It's my own business.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.
• Meg, when people don't know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named
• Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.
• Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.
• A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.
• A good laugh heals a lot of hurts.
• To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take.
• Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once.
• Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.
• there are dozens and dozens of ways to be a family ... Family tends to happen.

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Love

If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation. — Madeleine L'Engle

I like to take the time out to listen to the trees, much in the same way that I listen to a sea shell, holding my ear against the rough bark of the trunk, hearing the inner singing of the sap. It's a lovely sound, the beating of the heart of the tree. — Madeleine L'Engle

I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love. — Madeleine L'Engle

I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. — 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

We do not love each other without changing each other. — Madeleine L'Engle

On the other side of pain, there is still love. — Madeleine L'Engle

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. — Madeleine L'Engle

Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might. — Madeleine L'Engle

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About God

There are times when I feel that he has withdrawn from me, and I have often given him cause, but Easter is always the answer to My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me! — 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

Easter is always the answer to "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" — Madeleine L'Engle

To be a witness means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist. — Madeleine L'Engle

All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ . All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones. — Madeleine L'Engle

God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. — Madeleine L'Engle

For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground. — Madeleine L'Engle

Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love. — Madeleine L'Engle

Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence. — Madeleine L'Engle

Refusing to accept God's love because we're unworthy - of course we're unworthy! - is another golden calf. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Writing

I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe. — Madeleine L'Engle

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize. — Madeleine L'Engle

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. — 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

When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children. — Madeleine L'Engle

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth — Madeleine L'Engle

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. — Madeleine L'Engle

You have to write the book that wants to be written. — Madeleine L'Engle

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go. — Madeleine L'Engle

I know writers who write only when inspiration comes. How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it? He would be lousy. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Imaginative

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

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink. — Madeleine L'Engle

All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Book

I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be. — Madeleine L'Engle

A book comes and says, "Write me." My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate. — Madeleine L'Engle

One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof. — Madeleine L'Engle

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. — Madeleine L'Engle

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child. — Madeleine L'Engle

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment. — Madeleine L'Engle

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me. — Madeleine L'Engle

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words. — Madeleine L'Engle

A book comes and says, 'Write me. — Madeleine L'Engle

The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books," Miranda said. "It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Bright

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling. — Madeleine L'Engle

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony. — Madeleine L'Engle

This is the irrational seasonWhere love blooms bright and wild.Had Mary been filled with reasonThere'd have been no room for the child. — Madeleine L'Engle

Their love was a bright flower, youthful and radiantly beautiful. — Madeleine L'Engle

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Work

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it. — Madeleine L'Engle

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect. — 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

Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self. — Madeleine L'Engle

Das Werk lobt den Meister. (German: The work proves the craftsman.) — Madeleine L'Engle

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens. — Madeleine L'Engle

Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through. — Madeleine L'Engle

Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work. — Madeleine L'Engle

I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. — Madeleine L'Engle

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes About Write

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine. — Madeleine L'Engle

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. — Madeleine L'Engle

During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump. — Madeleine L'Engle

Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it. — Madeleine L'Engle

To write for children at all is an act of faith. — Madeleine L'Engle

Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared. — Madeleine L'Engle

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed. — Madeleine L'Engle

We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we'll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them. — Madeleine L'Engle

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness. — Madeleine L'Engle

You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you. — Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Famous Quotes And Sayings

But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. — Madeleine L'Engle

If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are. — Madeleine L'Engle

life is the greatest gift that could ever be conceived ... A daffodil pushing up through the dark earth to the spring, knowing somehow deep in its roots that spring and light and sunshine will come, has more courage and more knowledge of the value of life than any human being I've met. — Madeleine L'Engle

what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give. — Madeleine L'Engle

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous. — Madeleine L'Engle

When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten. — 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

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what. — Madeleine L'Engle

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. — Madeleine L'Engle

Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go our sane self control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the spirit. — Madeleine L'Engle

The virgin birth has never been a major stumbling block in my struggle with Christianity; it's far less mind boggling than the Power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us. — Madeleine L'Engle

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time. — Madeleine L'Engle

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes... — Madeleine L'Engle

If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody. — Madeleine L'Engle

Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding. — Madeleine L'Engle

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth — Madeleine L'Engle

I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. — Madeleine L'Engle

Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure. — Madeleine L'Engle

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known. — Madeleine L'Engle

Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves. — 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

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy. — Madeleine L'Engle

The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain. — Madeleine L'Engle

She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears. — Madeleine L'Engle

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. — Madeleine L'Engle

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

How do we teach a child our own, or those in a classroom to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have or need answers. — Madeleine L'Engle

It is the ability to choose which makes us human. — Madeleine L'Engle

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated. — Madeleine L'Engle

There is no way that you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true. — Madeleine L'Engle

It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it. — 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

Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person. — Madeleine L'Engle

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal. — Madeleine L'Engle

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract. — Madeleine L'Engle

If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester. — Madeleine L'Engle

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition. — Madeleine L'Engle

Like and equal are not the same thing at all. -- Meg Murray — Madeleine L'Engle

As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers — Madeleine L'Engle

In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come. — Madeleine L'Engle

Don't be afraid..." We need this reassurance. Even for those of us who believe implicitly in angels, to be confronted by one is an awesome thing." — Madeleine L'Engle

Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything. — Madeleine L'Engle

When we celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating that amazing time when the Word that shouted all the galaxies into being limited all power and, for love of us, came to us in the powerless body of a human baby. — 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

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present. — Madeleine L'Engle

When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband. — Madeleine L'Engle

'A Wrinkle in Time' was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. — Madeleine L'Engle

To be alive is to be vulnerable. — Madeleine L'Engle

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. — Madeleine L'Engle

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind. — Madeleine L'Engle

Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity? — Madeleine L'Engle

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist. — Madeleine L'Engle

I do not know everything; still many things I understand. — Madeleine L'Engle

It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real. — 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

Life Lessons by Madeleine L'Engle

1. Madeleine LEngle's work often explores themes of acceptance, growth, and resilience, emphasizing the importance of being true to oneself and embracing one's unique gifts.
2. She also encourages readers to be open-minded and to recognize the value of different perspectives and experiences.
3. Through her stories, she emphasizes the importance of self-discovery, friendship, and courage in the face of adversity.