L'engle Quotes

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

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

Believing takes practice.

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

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.

The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.

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.

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

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

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.

Like and equal are not the same thing at all.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

People are more than just the way they look.

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

I love, therefore I am vulnerable.

If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.

Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.

Only a fool is not afraid.

Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?

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.

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast

A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.

They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space." "Oh," the thin beast said. "Aren't they lonely?

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

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.

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.

Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.

No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.

Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.

Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

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.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.

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

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal.

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.

Wild nights are my glory!

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

A good laugh heals a lot of hurts.

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.

We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?" I do face facts," Meg said. They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

It was a dark and stormy night.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

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.

It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

In reading we must become creators.

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

On the other side of pain, there is still love.

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.

It's a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them--and they simply don't need you. That's all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on--this desperate need--and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.

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.

When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.

The earth will never be the same again Rock, water, tree, iron, share this greif As distant stars participate in the pain. A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf, A dolphin death, O this particular loss A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried If this small one was tossed away as dross, The very galaxies would have lied. How shall we sing our love's song now In this strange land where all are born to die? Each tree and leaf and star show how The universe is part of this one cry, Every life is noted and is cherished, and nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…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…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues, and thanked God that he was not like other men. Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, "Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

A great ring of pure & endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart And breaks apart the dusky clouds of night. The end of all is hinted in the start. When we are born we bear the seeds of blight; Around us life & death are torn apart, Yet a great ring of pure and endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart. It lights the world to my delight. Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark & dart. A grain of sand holds power & might. Infinity is present in each part, And a great ring of pure and endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart.