Madeleine L'Engle

“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

“Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.”

“I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't hav...”

“We hear a lot about evangelism today and how the church must pay more attention to evangelism. But mostly evangelism is not what we tell people, unless what we tell is totally consistent wit...”

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpubli...”

“It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.”

“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”

“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”

“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”

“Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.”

“Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It's a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here i am afflicted with it at my tender age.”

“But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born,...”

“We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don’t understand what we’re timing.”

“Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”

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

“Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.”

“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.”

“When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.”

“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.”