Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

There's nothing left except to try.

Nothing important is completely explicable.

Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding.

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

The prayer of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God as something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.

when I'm mad I don't have room to be scared.

Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!

The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

I'm different,and I like being different.Calvin's voice was unnaturally loud. Maybe I don't like being different,Meg said.but I don't want to be like everybody else,either.

If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

Behind the violence of the birthing of galaxies and stars and planets came a quiet and tender melody, a gentle love song. All the raging of creation, the continuing hydrogen explosions on the countless suns, the heaving of planetary bodies, all was enfolded in a patient, waiting love.

There's nothing the matter with his mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.

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.

But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?

Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.

Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.

If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.

but BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time.

For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.

She began to feel the sense of wonderful elation that always came to her when beauty took hold of her and made her forget her fears.

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.

You're going to get hurt yourself, and badly, if you take everything so hard.