Quotes from Madeleine L'Engle

Where there is an unreconciled quarrel, everybody suffers

Your father needs help, he needs courage, and for his children he may be able to do what he cannot do for himself.

Just as there are some wounds the greatest physicians cannot heal, so there are wounds of the soul that no human being can heal.

For the opposite of sin is faith and never virtue, and we live in a world which believes that self-control can make us virtuous. But that's not how it works. How many men and women we have encountered, of great personal virtue and moral rectitude, convinced of their own righteousness, who have also been totally insensitive to the needs of others and sometimes downright cruel!

Whatever we give, we have to give out of love. That, I believe, is the nature of God.

Ananda," Mrs. Murry said thoughtfully. "That rings some kind of bell." "It's Sanskrit," Charles Wallace said. Meg asked, "Does it mean anything?" "That joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.

I don't go along with the people who say they'd never want to live their childhoods again; I treasure every bit of mine, all the pains as well as the joy of discovery. But I also love being a grownup. To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven't lost any of my past, and am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look towards the future.

Her godfather was an English canon who had taught her about a God of love and compassion, a God who was mysterious and tremendous, but not to be understood as "two atoms of hydrogen plus one atom of oxygen make water" could be understood. A God who cared about all that had been created in love.

You've been angry all week, Simon, but you're taking it out on the wrong things. It's better to take it out on God. He can cope with all our angers. That's one thing my long span of chronology has taught me. If I take all my anger, if I take all my bitterness over the unfairness of this mortal life, and throw it all to God, he can take it all and transform it into love before he gives it back to me.

The haunted house was half in the shadows of the clump of elms in which it stood.

What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear beyond the possibility of comfort?

The sun does not rise in the sky in loneliness; we are with him. The moon would be lost in isolation if we did not greet her with song. The stars dance together, and we dance with them.