Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.

I share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe "is as good as a burnt out candle."

To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.

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.

Everything we do, our entire interior monologue, is prayer.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect, and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking.

Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might.

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.

To be a witness means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love.

If I'm not free to fail, I'm not free to take risks and everything in life that's worth doing involves a willingness to take a risk.

And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

I love, therefore I am vulnerable.

If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious impossible which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.