An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.

— Madeleine L'Engle

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers... To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy... If I try self-consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals

— Madeleine L'Engle

Art is communication.

— Madeleine L'Engle

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

— Madeleine L'Engle

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Shard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

— Madeleine L'Engle

As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.

— Madeleine L'Engle

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

— 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 grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!

— Madeleine L'Engle

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is international, and therefore 'religious.

— Madeleine L'Engle

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. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take… If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation… It takes a lifetime to learn another person… When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

— Madeleine L'Engle