Madeleine L'Engle

"Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person."

"Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else."

"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."

"we’re all a grab bag of good and eveil, and by and large can’t tell which is which"

"Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence."

"Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated."

"We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually."

"Why does anybody do anything" Mimi asked impatiently. "Most of the time we don't know--any of us."

"Listen, she said, "cherubim have come to my planet before."I know that. Where do you think I got my information"What do you know about us"I have heard that your host planet is shadowed, that it is troubled."It is beautiful," Meg said defensively. She felt a rippling of his wings. "In the middle of your cities"Well-no-but I don't live in a city."And is your planet peaceful"Well-no-it isn't very peaceful."I had the idea," Proginoskes moved reluctantly within her mind, "that there are wars on your planet. People fighting and killing each other."Yes, that's so, but-"And children go hungry."Yes."And people don't understand each other."Not always."And there's-there's hate"Yes."She felt Proginoskes pulling away. "All I want to do," he was murmuring to himself, "is go some place quiet and recite the names of the stars..."

"Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."

"We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift."

"“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.”"

"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."

"We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it."

"Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again."

"Life is not easy and comfortable, with nothing ever going wrong as long as you buy the right product. It's not true that if you have the right insurance everything is going to be fine. That's not what it's really like. Terrible things happen. And those are the things we learn from."

"Prayer was never meant to be magic,' Mother said.'Then why bother with it' Suzy scowled.'Because it's an act of love,' Mother said."

"Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it."

"If we allow our "high creativity" to remain alive, we will never be bored. We can pray, standing in line at the super market. Or we can be lost in awe at all the people around us, their lives full of glory and tragedy, and suddenly we will have the beginnings of a painting, a story, a song."

"I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religiousorder. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young peopleinto an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our childrenreceive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun,for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world asnever before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, orwhat I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoidby providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."