Madeleine L'Engle Thinking Quotations

The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.

Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.

We tend to think things are new because we've just discovered them.

Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think.

If you want to write . . . keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?

It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have.

When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take use all the way.

God understands that part of us which is more than what we think we are.

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

Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?" I do face facts," Meg said. They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

When I look at the galaxies on a clear night - when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated and diminished by it, I am enlarged . . . I rejoice that I am a part of it.

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.

One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect, and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking.

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.

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth

I've got a sweater." Ben pulled off his coat and held it out for her. "Here." "Thanks, Ben. It's lovely and warm." Then she said, "Ben, I-- I can tell you how I feel about-- about everything. I think you're the best friend I've ever had. I-- I'd lie down and die for you if you wanted me to." "Honey," Ben said. "When I get you to lie down for me it won't be to die.

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.

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.