Madeleine L'Engle

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.

There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.

We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

In reading we must become creators.

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

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.

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

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.

Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.