A book comes and says, Write me. My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.
– Madeleine L'Engle
Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.
– Madeleine L'Engle
Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
– Madeleine L'Engle
Her hands were broad and strong; the true pianist's sledgehammer hands, they had been called. They still moved to her bidding. No matter to what she likened them-turnips, carrots-they were still as nimble as ever. The notes came clear and true.
– Madeleine L'Engle
I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as written by Dostoyevsky and heavily edited by John Updike.
– Madeleine L'Engle
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 groth.
– Madeleine L'Engle
I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.
– Madeleine L'Engle
I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take.
– Madeleine L'Engle
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.
– Madeleine L'Engle
In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.
– Madeleine L'Engle
Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.
– Madeleine L'Engle
It is the ability to choose which makes us human.
– Madeleine L'Engle
She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.
– Madeleine L'Engle
We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.
– Madeleine L'Engle
When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.
– Madeleine L'Engle
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
– Madeleine L'Engle
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.
– Madeleine L'Engle
A life lived in chaos is an impossibility...
– Madeleine L'Engle
We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.
– Madeleine L'Engle
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
– Madeleine L'Engle
Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.