MADELEINE L'ENGLE

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

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.

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

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

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

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

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

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

There are times when I feel that he has withdrawn from me, and I have often given him cause, but Easter is always the answer to My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.