- "I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.
I Name you Calvin.
I Name you Mr. Jenkins.
I Name you Proginoskes.
I fill you with Naming.
Be!
Be, butterfly and behemoth,
be galaxy and grasshopper,
star and sparrow,
you matter,
you are,
be!
Be caterpillar and comet,
Be porcupine and planet,
sea sand and solar system,
sing with us,
dance with us,
rejoice with us,
for the glory of creation,
seagulls and seraphim
angle worms and angel host,
chrysanthemum and cherubim.
(O cherubim.)
Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us.
Be!"
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door - "I really do understand that people change, as Wolfi said, not so much from who we are as to who we are."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Severed Wasp - "I remember I turned on the light and stood in front of the mirror, looking at myself, frightened because people thought when they were getting ready for bed, and didn't think about me because I wasn't the most important thing in their lives at all. Mother and Father'd always made me feel that I was important, and now all of a sudden I realized I wasn't. How can you be important when nobody knows about you? It very frightening to realize you aren't important after all."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Camilla - "I suppose it's arrogance or selfishness or something to care so much about being loved that I could feel that no one loved me. It was only with Andrew in all the world that I knew I was loved, that I was worth loving. Not because of me, Charlotte, but because I was his mother. Not because I was a good mother but because simply, biologically, I was his. No matter what I was like, no matter how much I was lacking, I was still his mother, there was this basic, primary fact that was there and that nothing could ever change, not anything I did or didn't do. So I believed that he loved me. And so I was--I was freed. With everybody else in the world I haven't believed it, and so I haven't been free." She had never put this into words before; it hurt to hear it, but it was true; it was Charlotte. "And if anybody is for a moment gentle with me, then I am--I can't explain, I dissolve, I'm completely undone"
- Madeleine L'Engle, The Love Letters - "I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously--to be, in fact, a true adult."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn't get along together, and what made people tick. That's why I started to write stories."
- Madeleine L'Engle - "I've worked with a lot of artists, Em, and they all have a need that cannot be met by another human being."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Certain Women - "If I have something that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Circle of Quiet - "If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said, by me. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "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, The Irrational Season - "If you want to see the stars you must go out into the country where there are no lights to dim them. But if you really want to see the stars then you must be out in the middle of the ocean. Then you can see them as the sailors and navigators saw them in the days when stars were known as very few people know them now."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Arm of the Starfish - "In Egypt, I learned why the women drew black lines of kohl around their eyes: to produce shadow, to protect their eyes from the fierceness of the sun. We see because of the sun, but if there were no shadows that light would quickly blind us. We need the shadows of buildings to protect us at least a little from heat."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves - "In true love, the lover's pleasure comes in giving himself wholly to the loved one. When we try to give ourselves to ourselves, that is not only perversion, it is ultimately suicide."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "Intimacy between friends involves a non dominant love, as well as vulnerability. With a true friend we can share the deepest places of our hearts, the dark as well as the light. I have friends whose secrets will go to the grave with me, as mine with them. We listen, we share, we laugh, we accept. We seldom give advice, and when we do it is for love, not power. We play together, and this is a special delight for me in my mid-seventies, to have friends with whom I can play with the enthusiasm and whole-heartedness of a child."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves - "It has only recently struck me that we need our shadow-casters, metaphorically as well as physically. What in me casts shadows, and what kind?"
- Madeleine L'Engle - "It is the ability to choose which makes us human."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water
Madeleine L'Engle Quotes
By Esther Lombardi, About.com
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