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Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

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  • "It's a peculiar thing about pain. We can help each other bear it. Not just by caring, by making it bearable because we care - though that helps."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "Love isn't how you feel, it's what you do."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Wind in the Door

  • "Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

  • "Mostly, no matter how inadequate my playing, the music is all that matters: I am outside time, outside self, in play, in joy. When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

  • "My father answered the waiter in French, but his French, instead of sounding all curves and music like Chopin or the ballet, was as square and angular as a problem in algebra."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, Camilla

  • "My training in physics has taught me that there is no such thing as coincidence."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

  • "My moments of being most complete, most integrated, have come either in complete solitude or when I am being part of a body made up of many people going in the same direction."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season

  • "Nothing important is completely explicable."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

  • "Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "Perhaps the times I seem most sure are the times I am most unsure. A good deal of the time I simply act, with great positiveness and very little assurance. I have all the arrogance of utter insecurity."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Love Letters

  • "Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light years away."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow

  • "Play is part of intimacy, and in our busy world we don't play enough."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves

  • "Sacrifice is no longer popular, but I think that sometimes it can lead to true joy. Even the simplest of unions does not come free. There is always sacrifice."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves

  • "She had that spontaneous quality of aliveness which illuminates people who have already done a lot of their dying, and I think I am beginning to understand the truth of that."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

  • "Six months after I started to write Wrinkle, I discovered higher math. And for me, higher math is much easier than lower math. Lower math lost me in 4th grade when I was taught that 0 x 3 equals 0. Now, I understand that if I have nothing and I multiply it by 0, 3 something's are not going to appear. But, if I have 3 apples and I multiply them by 0, why are they going to vanish? So I wiped out lower math as philosophically untenable."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "So dis-aster is separation from the stars."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow

  • "Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

  • "Surely, George Macdonald is the grandfather of us all -- all who struggle to come to terms with truth through fantasy."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "The best way to help the world is to start by loving each other, not blandly, blindly, but realistically, with understanding and forebearance and forgiveness."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "The books I read most as a child were by Lucy Maud Montgomery, who's best known for her Anne of Green Gables stories, but I also liked Emily of New Moon. Emily was an only child, as I was. Emily lived on an island, as did I. Although Manhattan Island and Prince Edward Island are not very much alike, they are still islands. Emily's father was dying of bad lungs, and so was mine. Emily had some dreadful relatives, and so did I. She had a hard time in school, and she also understood that there's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate. I loved Emily."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, Circle of Quiet

  • "The moment that humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time. Therefore, the act of creating--painting a picture, singing a song, writing a story--is a humble act? This was a new thought to me. Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

  • "The scientists think it likely that there may be other planets out there, but this far nobody's been able to communicate with anybody else. Maybe we'd better learn to communicate with each other first."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "The seahorse might well be a symbol for the more extreme branches of women's lib, because the female seahorse lays her eggs in the male's pouch and then he has to carry eggs to term, go through labor pains and bear the babies."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season

  • "The way of peacemaking given us may be something so small that it seems hardly worth doing, but it is these small offerings which build our reflexes for the larger ones."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season

  • "The world is changing rapidly--that terrifies people. We know a great deal more now about the nature of the universe than we used to, which I think makes it all the more exciting. But change is frightening to people. And when you get frightened, you strike out."
    - Madeleine L'Engle

  • "Then there are real people. They're a very small class, and very wonderful. They're not creators, they're not artists, but they can understand and appreciate consciously..."
    - Madeleine L'Engle, The Small Rain

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