Madeleine L'Engle Quotes - Page 2

Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.

Our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.

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

Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don’t forget that he never promised he’d say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing . . . .

That he cares . . . That is all. Nothing else.

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.

But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

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.

Sorry. I get attacks of quotitis every once in a while. It's a very rare disease with no cure. It usually attacks older people, and here i am afflicted with it at my tender age.

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.

And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

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

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

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.

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

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble-times when I have seen people tempted to deny God-when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

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