Madeleine L'Engle Quotes
-
Henneberger: If the Bible is not literally true, does that mean we don’t need to take it seriously? L'Engle: Oh no, you do, because it’s truth, not fact, and you have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts.
-
When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.
-
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
-
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.
-
The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
-
A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.
-
Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.
-
The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.
-
It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.
-
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
-
It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.... I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah... Faith is best expressed in story.
-
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
-
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
-
Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
-
It is the ability to choose which makes us human.
-
It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God.
-
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
-
Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.
-
One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.
-
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…
-
One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.
-
Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
-
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.
-
I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.