Madeleine L'Engle

Don't be afraid..." We need this reassurance. Even for those of us who believe implicitly in angels, to be confronted by one is an awesome thing."

Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

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.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.

Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, "It's my own business.

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.

To grow up is to find the small part you are playing in the extraordinary drama written by somebody else.

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast

In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

We human beings grow through our failures, not our virtues.

Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of IQ tests.

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.

I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it.

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?