Typeset Quotes

Madeleine L’Engle Quotes

February 15, 2010 at 17:15 (Uncategorized) (A Ring of Endless Light, A Stone for a Pillow, a wind in the door, advice, authors, books, children's books, madeleine lengle, Meet the Austins, speeches, writing, ya, young adult)

Instead of posting random quotes I’ve collected, this time I am going to focus on Madeleine L’Engle. I’ve been reading a lot by her & researching her, hopefully to study as part of my Communication Theory project this Spring.
And a thank you to Laina for contributing two of these quotes.

“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”

“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.”

“Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.”

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability…. To be alive is to be vulnerable.”

“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”

“I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.
 I Name you Calvin. 
I Name you Mr. Jenkins. 
I Name you Proginoskes.
 I fill you with Naming.
 Be!
 Be, butterfly and behemoth,
 be galaxy and grasshopper,
 star and sparrow,
 you matter, 
you are, 
be!
 Be caterpillar and comet,
 Be porcupine and planet,
 sea sand and solar system,
 sing with us,
 dance with us,
 rejoice with us,
 for the glory of creation, 
seagulls and seraphim
angle worms and angel host,
 chrysanthemum and cherubim.
 (O cherubim.)
 Be!
 Sing for the glory
 of the living and the loving
 the flaming of creation
sing with us
, dance with us
, be with us.
 Be!”

- A Wind in the Door

“I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn’t get along together, and what made people tick. That’s why I started to write stories.”

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

- A Ring of Endless Light

“Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light years away.”

- A Stone for a Pillow

The scientists think it likely that there may be other planets out there, but this far nobody’s been able to communicate with anybody else. Maybe we’d better learn to communicate with each other first.”

“So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.” I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.”
- Newberry Award acceptance speech

Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.
- Newberry Award acceptance speech

“A writer of fantasy, fairly tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”
- Newberry Award acceptance speech

“Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it.”
- Newberry Award acceptance speech

“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
- Newberry Award acceptance speech

“A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens’ imaginations.
What!?!
It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad.
Put them down in the imagination of their hearts.
Their imagination is only to do evil.
Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision.”
- Margaret Edwards Award acceptance speech

“Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers. What does the consumer think? What does the consumer want? How ugly. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes. I want us to be nourishers.”
- Margaret Edwards Award acceptance speech

“There are many distinct voices in the world of YA literature today, and the chief thing they have in common is their honoring of the human spirit. Their protagonists are always subjects, and never objects. One definition of pornography I was given is treating people as objects. In most YA novels we are able to enter into the subject, to feel empathy, to be willing to be part of the story.”
- Margaret Edwards Award acceptance speech

Our grandfather, Mother’s father, lives in a stable.
Maybe I’d better explain a little about this.
- Meet the Austins

Then I felt fingers gently at the back of my neck. “Vicky. I’m sorry. It’s not you. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. I’ve been in a filthy mood. Get me out my mood.” His voice was soft, cajoling.
“Why’re you in a filthy mood?”
“Just one of the times I hate everybody. Except you. Don’t let me drive you away, Vicky. I have a way of doing that. Driving away anybody I happen to love. Stick by me, Vicky, will you?
What do you do when someone speaks to you like that, particularly if that somebody is Zachary? Sure I’d stick by him. I’d do anything he wanted me to do.
- The Moon by Night

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