75 quotes
I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
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…
The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)
I think that this scene is upsetting because it calls us beyond fact into the vast world of imagination, and imagination is a word of many dimensions.
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.
Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared.
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
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.
Walking on Water (1980)
Language is often changed by writers.
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005)
The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate.
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
My protagonists, male and female, are me.
The Irrational Season (1977)
"God go before us," or "God lead us."
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Alike and Equal are not the same.
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it's perfectly true.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light.
The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)
I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.
The Irrational Season (1977)
I sometimes think God is a s--t — and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s--t.
Newsweek interview (2004)
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.
A Circle of Quiet (1972)