Madeleine L'Engle Giving Quotations

What can we give a child when there is nothing left?

Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!

If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love.

It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.

If you're too happy about anything, fate usually gives you a good sock in the jaw and knocks you down.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

Meg, I give you your faults." "My faults!" Meg cried. "Your faults." "But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!" "Yes," Mrs. Whatsit said. "However, I think you'll find they'll come in very handy on Camazotz.

Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?

What can we give a child when there is nothing left? All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding.

As I listen to the silence, I learn that my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable. To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.

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.