Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Meg, I give you your faults. My faults! Meg cried. Your faults. But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults! Yes, Mrs. Whatsit said. However, I think you'll find they'll come in very handy on Camazotz.

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.

The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.

The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books, Miranda said. It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.

People become trustworthy when they are trusted.

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.

God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.

One of the most pusillanimous things we of the female sex have done throughout the centuries is to have allowed the male sex to assume that mankind is masculine. It is not. It takes both male and female to make the image of God. The proper understanding of mankind is that it is only a poor, broken thing if either male or female is excluded.

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.

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

No! Alike and equal are not the same thing at all!

Do you think things always have an explanation? Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Poets are born knowing the language of angels.

Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure.

To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk—not safety and security—that we overcome darkness.

What I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.

When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.

That's a sure way to tell about somebody--the way they play, or don't play, make-believe.

Vitam impendre vero. (To stake one's life for the truth.)