Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

Un asno viejo sabe más que un potro. A. Perez. An old ass knows more than a young colt.

All you have to remember is that every ordinary fraction can be converted into an infinite periodic decimal fraction. See? So is 0.428571.

I'll be down at the foot of the road at seven o'clock. The high-school bus covers so much distance and makes so many stops it takes an hour and a half, and I get on at one of the first stops.

Meg spoke to the few remaining cauliflower heads—"it's falling apart. It's not right in the United States of America that a little kid shouldn't be safe in school.

Therre willl nno llonggerr bee sso manyy pplleasanntt thinggss too llookk att iff rressponssible ppeoplle ddo nnott ddoo ssomethingg aboutt thee unnppleassanntt oness.

I enjoy cooking. It's therapy for me. Louise's therapy is her rose garden. You may note, Polly, that we don't have any roses.

When I am stuck in writing a book, when I am stuck in a problem in life, if I go to the piano and play Bach for an hour, the problem is usually either resolved or accepted.

We must not take from our children—or ourselves—the truth that is in the world of the imagination.

They're able to live with this kind of intimacy and not be destroyed by it.

Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hugh Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: Love is not an emotion. It is a policy. Those words have often helped me when all my feelings were unlovely.

See? So is 0.428571.

The only thing I know about the Second Coming is that it is going to happen because of God's love. God made the universe out of love; the Word shouted all things joyfully into being because of love. The Second Coming, whenever it happens and whatever it means, will also be because of love.

None of us likes to see himself as he must appear to others.

Now we leave our tears for mirth. Now we sing, not death, but birth.

Cecily moved her lips slowly, "Now I lay me," and "Our Father," and "God bless." And then, defiantly, "Dear balloon man, please dear balloon man, Father says you know God personally, and maybe he wouldn't hear me because I'm not very big or important, so would you please make Mother get well and come home and sing me the song about the king of the cannibal islands?

You feel things too deeply to bear them unless you can get them out of yourself through some sort of art.

The day was gold and amber and russet and copper and bronze, with occasional flashes of flame.

Her mind had snapped. It was some kind of hallucination caused by the weather, by her anxiety, by the state of the world—

I think this is one of the situations where there is no right choice. We have to pray that we make the choice that is the least wrong.

You waste your energy going up and down instead of going forward.' She continued to walk calmly beside Felix.

Meg, I give you your faults.

Remember that the human brain is a very delicate organism, and it can be easily damaged.

When I think of the children's books I love best, I realize that they're written on a great many different levels. Now the first level is story. A good children's book must hold the reader's interest. It must be first and foremost a good story that will make the reader keep wanting to go on turning the pages. But underneath that good story is buried treasure. No one person will find all of the treasure, but each will discover special joys.

The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe