Madeleine L'Engle Way Quotations

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

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

Accepting that we are angry is a healthy and appropriate response as long as we don't get stuck in it. Acknowledging it is one way of going through it.

To be a witness means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

The prayer of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God as something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.

People are more than just the way they look.

The best way to guide children without coercion is to be ourselves.

If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.

We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

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

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

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

That's a sure way to tell about somebody--the way they play, or don't play, make-believe.

There is no way that you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true.

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is.

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.

there are dozens and dozens of ways to be a family ... Family tends to happen.