Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

I suppose that depends on how you look at it," Meg said. "Usually no matter what happens people think it's my fault, even if I have nothing to do with it at all. But I'm sorry I tried to fight him. It's just been an awful week. And I'm full of bad feeling.

If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God (as did the men of the Christian establishment of Galileo's day), then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God.

What would I be singing, Vicky wondered,—if I sang out my moods?

It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

William Langland, writing around 1400, said, 'And all the wickedness in the world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea.

I do hope I wasn't born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated human host on a lonely planet like yours.

your behaviour must be such that when you go to bed at night you will be happy with what you have done during the day

That joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.

Strangely, as much as I heard the word secular as a label on things that should be avoided by good Christians, I don't ever remember hearing the word sacred as its opposite. Instead, I heard the words clean and safe to describe what was not deemed worldly. Clean and safe. How puny those words are. What a pitiful reduction of the grandeur of the created world and its inhabitants. What a sad commentary on the church's understanding of the God of the universe.

It is the nature of love to create, and no matter what we do to creation, that love is still there, creating; in the young man who is holding his jacket closed across his chest; in you; in me.

All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men remain silent and do nothing.

Why is it, she wondered, that things that hurt people make them deeper and more understanding?