Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.

We are the called according to His purpose, and whom He calls, them He also justifies. Of course we have help, and without help it would be much more difficult.

Joy is what has made the pain bearable and, in the end, creative rather than destructive.

The answer has something to do with love. Love that has to go through darkness and pain and endurance and a stark acceptance before it can come out into the far light of the sun.

What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairy tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

Maybe you have to know the darkness to truly appreciate the light."—Madeleine L'Engle

So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.

And another lovely paradox: we can be humble only when we know that we are God's children, of infinite value, and eternally loved.

Ananda: that joy without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.

My heart believed even when my mind faltered. I listened to my heart and I wrote A Wrinkle in Time as an affirmation that there was indeed light in the darkness with which I was surrounded. I wrote it for God.

Our children... have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent. As George Tyrrell wrote about a hundred years ago, If a [man's] craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed on true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.