madeleine l’engle quotes

Madeleine L’Engle has been one of the most influential voices in my grown-up faith. I quote her on the daily, and I’ve decided to compile a bunch of her brilliance here on my blog. If I’ve referenced them in a previous blog, it is linked beside it so you can see how it’s influenced my life and thoughts. But even without those links… here’s a collection of seriously great Madeleine L’Engle quotes.

 

And It Was Good:

• “No matter what else can be said about human beings, we do provide good stories.” {blog}
• “There is nothing we need be afraid to say before the Lord.” {blog}
• “We do not love each other without changing each other.” {blog}

A Wrinkle In Time:

• “Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?”” {blog}

A Ring of Endless Light:

• “There’s a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There’s a kind of vanity in goodness.” {blog}

A Stone For A Pillow:

• “We are not perfect. Only God is perfect. And God does not ask us to be perfect; God asks us to be human. This means to know at all times that we are God’s children, never to lose our connection with our Creator. Jesus was sinless not because he didn’t do wrong things: he broke the law, picking corn, for instance, on the Sabbath. He was sinless because he was never for a moment separated from the Source.” {blog}

The Rock That Is Higher:

• “…where there is true joy, there is home.” {blog}
• “Do we dare less than God’s people in Scripture? What has happened to us? Don’t we trust the Lord enough to tell our Maker how we really feel?” {blog}
• “Sometimes we are in situations where the is no right choice, and we have to make the choice which we prayerfully believe to be the least wrong, never forgetting that it is wrong.”
• “Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.” {blog} {blog 2}
• We do not need to think of our obligations in terms of success; we would fail to do anything at all if we knew we had to succeed. We simply do what we can; we offer our little loaves and fishes and leave the rest to the Lord.

Walking on Water:

•  “But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.” {blog}

 

• “Just because we don’t understand does not mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.” {blog}
• “That’s the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they’ve been all along.” {blog}
• “I learn my lessons slowly, seldom once for all. Continually, they have to be learned and relearned, not with solemnity, but with awe and laughter and joy.” {blog}
• “So I go to church, not because of any legalistic or moralistic reasons, but because I am a hungry sheep who needs to be fed; and for the same reason that I wear a wedding ring: a public witness of a private commitment.” {blog}
• “…we do not need to think of our obligations in terms of success; we would fail to do anything at all if we knew we had to succeed. We simply do what we can; we offer our little loaves and fishes and leave the rest to the Lord” {blog}
• “If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.” {blog}
• “Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.” {blog}
• “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” {blog}
• “In a moment of crisis we don’t act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we’d better remember we’re still closely related to Pavlov’s dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver’s body works kinesthetically . . .A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I’m convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we’ve made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.”
• “Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, “It’s my own business.” {blog}
• “I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.” {blog}
• “Believing takes practice.”
• “Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.” {blog}
• “In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.”
• “It is only when we are fully rooted that we are really able to move.” {blog}
• “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” {blog}