Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Madeleine L'Engle was an American writer, who published more than 60 books in her lifetime. One of her most famous books was A Wrinkle in Time, but she also wrote works of poetry. Here are a few quotes from Madeleine L'Engle.

• "A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season
  
  
• "A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "A life lived in chaos is an impossibility."
  - 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, Penguins and Golden Calves
  
  
• "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, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "And joy is always a promise."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "And what did I mean by trying to 'be good'? To knock down selfishness, self-will, I suppose, and this is no do-it-yourself job. We can no more 'try' to be virtuous than we can tryto be humble, or to act with integrity."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "Art should communicate with as many people as possible."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water
  
  
• "Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling."
  - Madeleine L'Engle
  
  
• "Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves
  
  
• "Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are. "
  - Madeleine L'Engle
  
  
• "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, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, The Small Rain
  
  
• "Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
  
  
• "For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
  
  
• "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, Penguins and Golden Calves
  
  
• "Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "I also read quite 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."
  - Madeleine L'Engle
  
  
• "I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "I believe that consistently we need to look for good, and not for evil, that when we look for evil we call up evil, while heaven comes closer when we acknowledge it."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves
  
  
• "I believe that we all have this dark underestimation of ourselves. Sometimes it is masked as arrogance, overestimation, superiority, but underneath the brashness the problem is insecurity and only unqualified, unmerited, unconditional love can assuage it."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves
  
  
• "I don't like writing two books of the same genre in a row."
  - 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
  
  
• "I look at many of the brilliant, sophisticated intellectuals of my generation, struggling through psychoanalysis, balancing sleeping pills with waking pills, teetering on the thin edge of despair, and think that perhaps they have not found the answer after all."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
  
  
• "I look at Mother, and think that if I am to reflect on the eventual death of her body, of all bodies, in a way that is not destructive, I must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final, physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom: the death of self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices which, instead of making us more fully alive, make us less."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
  
  
• "I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take."
  - Madeleine L'Engle
  
  
• "I love the small group of women with whom I meet weekly to discuss whatever book we have chosen and what it means in our lives... We do not try to coerce each other, even when we disagree. We try to listen to each other... Therefore, this group is for me another icon, and one that helps me to keep my eyes and ears open, and my mind ready to move and grow in understanding."
  - Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves