Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'Englewas an American writer best known for young-adult fiction, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door, National Book Award-winning A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science...
husband musical trying
My husband is my most ruthless critic... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.
feet dignity wrinkle-in-time
Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?
able explanation humans
With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.
beautiful flower
Their love was a bright flower, youthful and radiantly beautiful.
mean acceptance thinking
When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take use all the way.
real parent way
If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.
religious flower rocks
My lovely shining fragile broken house is filled with flowers and founded on a rock.
moving home maturity
But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?
letting-go discovery reason
the discoveries don't come when you're looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control.
growing-up drama grows
To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.
fate giving sock
If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.
life way mature
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.
art drug consciousness
All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.
children growing-up fall
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.