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...
book writing stories
My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go. That’s what happens when you write stories. You listen and you say ‘a ha,’ and you write it down. A lot of it is not planned, not conscious; it happens while you’re doing it. You know more about it after you’re done.
stars wind listening
Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.
prayer moving may
To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.
love-each-other
We do not love each other without changing each other.
moving passion long
A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.
jobs real humility
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.
creative risk failing
If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.
light evil darkness
Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.
laughter never-forget forget
I hope that I will never forget the salvific power of joyful laughter.
birthday success nursing
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
creativity alive creator
But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.
art stars moving
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.
letting-go plato mean
Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go our sane self control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the spirit.
art names giving
Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.