- "There's a theory which I take seriously... that we live until we do whatever we're meant to do. Mozart started composing at an incredibly early age, and when he died young he had accomplished the purpose for which he was born."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Severed Wasp - "'Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about,' Charles Wallace said. 'Why should I disillusion them?'"
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time - "This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves. The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "To be in a state of unforgiveness is to know hell, at least in a small way."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow - "To deny friendship is unlove."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A House Like a Lotus - "to forget is a form of suicide"
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take."
- Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season - "We are the song of the universe. We sing with the angelic host. We are the musicians. The farae and the stars are the singers. Our song orders the rhythm of creation."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door - "We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water - "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 tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending!"
- Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves - "We're right now at a new paradigm shift, and I don't think any of us have really caught on to it, but it is far more terrifying than anything that Darwin suggested."
- Madeleine L'Engle - "What I think is that if we're still around after we die, it will be more like those moments when we let go, than the way we are most of the time. It'll be--it'll be the self beyond the self we know"
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light - "What is forever? It cannot be in time, because time can be measured, and forever cannot. Time is inextricably tangled up with place, and can be measured only against place (dark of night in New York; grey of morning in Beja). Time has meaning only in relation to its position in space, the movement of a planet about a sun, of a night through stars."
- Madeleine L'Engle, The Love Letters - "What is my own shadow? If we all had the ability to recognize our shadows we might not be driven by them."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves - "When I start a new seminar, I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "When we fall as we always do, we pick ourselves up and start again. And when our trust is betrayed the only response that is not destructive is to trust again. Not stupidly you understand, but fully aware of the facts, we still have to trust."
- Madeleine L'Engle, The Young Unicorns - "When we make ourselves vulnerable, we do open ourselves to pain, sometimes excruciating pain. The more people we love, the more we are liable to be hurt, and not only by the people we love, but for the people we love."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Penguin and Golden Calves - "when you put something into words, it leads to so many other thoughts"
- Madeleine L'Engle, The Small Rain - "Wherever there is unity in diversity, then we are free to be ourselves; it cannot be done in isolation; we need each other."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "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 - "With the people I love most I can sit in silence indefinitely. We need both for our full development; the joy of the sense of sound; and the equally great joy of its absence."
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet - "You can always tell Schubert by that sadness that's under everything he writes, even the merriest stuff."
- Madeleine L'Engle, Certain Women
"To put it into Euclid or old fashioned plane geometry, a starlight line is not the shortest distance between two points."
- Madeleine L'Engle, On the Other Side of the Sun
