Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

You must not refuse to do this, or you, too, will be accused. In the town they have convicted entire families." Richard said, "There was another carpenter, once, and he would have refused to do this thing. Him I will follow.

What else is the electric chair or lethal injection than human sacrifice?

Don't be afraid to be afraid.

Forgive me, I'm preaching. I've spent so much of my life giving sermons that it's a habit I find hard to break.

Three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high.

Maybe our intimacies are more precious if we know they may be taken away.

how there's very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy.

It's a stage we all go through; it takes a certain amount of living to strike the strange balance between the two errors either of regarding ourselves as unforgivable or as not needing forgiveness.

They're a good family...One can tell a great deal around a dinner table...I think the closest we ever come in this naughty world to realizing unity in diversity is around a family table. I felt it at their table, the wholeness of the family unit, freely able to expand to include friends, to include me even through Austin's and my suspicions of each other, and yet each person in that unit complete, individual, unique, valued.

I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors; as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.

The sky lightened, and the sun sent its fiery rays over the edge of the lake, reaching up into the sky, pulling itself, dripping, from the waters of the night.

the world has been abnormal for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.

but music, which is inextricably intertwined with time, is also paradoxically a release from time

The Mother asks the sacrifice of love.

An icon is not meant to be an idol. Just a reminder that love is greater than hate.

I don't know. We don't have to know everything at once. We just do one thing at a time, as it is given us to do.

We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story or the painting or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.

I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.

Que la terre est petite à qui la voit des cieux! Delille. How small is the earth to him who looks from heaven

On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems. You

Why does the joy of love contain so much sadness? We're afraid of the sadness because it grows and spreads and becomes too terrible to be borne. And because it leads to tenderness. Tenderness. The moment of tenderness, the undoing, unbearable moment of tenderness.

If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers

With my intellect I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can't settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it.

??????? ?????, ????? ?' ???????? ?????. Euripides. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.