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.

— Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?” “I give up. Why do lawyers never get bitten by snakes?” “Professional courtesy.

— Madeleine L'Engle

I’m too young and the world is too old.

— Madeleine L'Engle

We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethans used “um” and “er” the way we do?

— Madeleine L'Engle

I was filled with anxiety that something might happen to him while we were far from home. I did not voice my fear or write about them in my journal, because that would have given them a reality I desperately desired to avoid.

— Madeleine L'Engle

We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a sense of family, of belonging to each other. No wonder our kids are struggling to start communes.

— Madeleine L'Engle

I’ve looked for an image in someone else’s mirror, and so have avoided seeing myself.

— Madeleine L'Engle

We want nothing from you that you do without grace,” Mrs Whatsit said, “or that you do without understanding.

— Madeleine L'Engle

Plato also wrote – and I lettered this in firm italic letters and posted it on my dorm-room door – All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.

— Madeleine L'Engle

The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware.

— Madeleine L'Engle

What I remember from Ruskin is the phrase the cursed animosity of inanimate objects, which I mutter under my breath when I get in a tangle of wire coat hangers. I also wonder if there is any such thing as an inanimate object.

— Madeleine L'Engle

One theory I find rather comforting is that time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.

— Madeleine L'Engle

But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol. I don’t want that kind of God.

— Madeleine L'Engle

Everything that we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off.

— Madeleine L'Engle

We human creatures can make watches and clocks and sensitive timing devices, but we don’t understand what we’re timing.

— Madeleine L'Engle

In a world where pleasure rules, people tend to be underdeveloped in every other way.

— Madeleine L'Engle

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.

— Madeleine L'Engle

And I was, as clearly as I can express something that is really unexpressible, out on the other side of fear.

— Madeleine L'Engle

God doesn’t stop the bad things from happening; that’s never been part of the promise. The promise is: I am with you. I am with you now until the end of time.

— Madeleine L'Engle

Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.

— Madeleine L'Engle

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I.

— Madeleine L'Engle
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