850 Quotes by Madeleine L'Engle

At Tara in this fateful hour,I place all Heaven with its power,And the sun with its brightness,And the snow with its whiteness,And the fire with all the strength it hath,And the lightning with its rapid wrath,And the winds with their swiftness along their path,And the sea with its deepness,And the rocks with their steepness,And the earth with its starkness:All these I place,By God's almighty help and graceBetween myself and the powers of darkness!

In my dreams, I never have an age.

Art is communication.

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 us all the way.

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

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 figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God.

Maybe the job of the artist is to see through all of this strangeness to what really is, and that takes a lot of courage and a strong faith in the validity of the artistic vision even if there is not a conscious faith in God.

Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.