Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

“If you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.”

“We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.”

“Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”

“It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”

“Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?”

“Calvin said, “Do you know that this is the first time I’ve seen you without your glasses?” “I’m blind as a bat without them. I’m near-sighted, like father.” “Well, you know what, you’ve got dream-boat eyes,” Calvin said. “Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don’t think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.”

“It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.”

“Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.”

“When I’m mad I don’t have room to be scared.”

“If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.”

“But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own.”

“You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.”

“I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”

“There’s nothing left except to try.”

“You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

“Maybe I don’t like being different,” Meg said. “but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either.”

“Wild nights are my glory!”

“Like and equal are not the same thing at all!”

“People are more than just the way they look.”

“Only a fool is not afraid.”

“I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”

“We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.”

“It was a star,” Mrs. Whatsit said sadly. “A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won, oh, yes, my children, it won. But it lost its life in the winning.”

“You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling? Mrs Murry asked. “A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn.”

“In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

“Beware of pride and arrogance, Charles, for they may betray you.”