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Madeleine L'Engle (November 29, 1918 – September 6, 2007)^[1] was an American writer best known for her Young Adult fiction, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect her strong interest in modern science. Tesseracts, for example, are featured prominently in A Wrinkle in Time, mitochondrial DNA in A Wind in the Door, and organ regeneration in The Arm of the Starfish.

Early life

Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born in New York City, and named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine L'Engle, otherwise known as Mado.^[2] Her mother, a pianist, was also named Madeleine. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer, a critic, and a foreign correspondent who according to his daughter suffered lung damage from fat exposure to mustard gas during World War I. (In a 2004 New Yorker profile of the writer, relatives of L'Engle disputed the mustard gas story, claiming instead that Camp's illness was caused by alcoholism.)

L'Engle wrote her first story at age five, and began keeping a journal at age eight.^[3] These early literary attempts did not translate into academic success at the New York City private school where she was enrolled. A shy, clumsy child, she was branded as stupid by some of her teachers. Unable to please them, she retreated into her own world of books and writing. Her parents often disagreed about how to raise her, and as a result she attended a number of boarding schools and had many governesses.^[4] They traveled frequently. At one point, the family moved to a chateau near Chamonix in the French Alps, in what Madeleine described as the hope that the cleaner air would be easier on her father's lungs. Madeleine was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, but in 1933 the family moved to northern Florida, and she attended another boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. When her father died in 1935, Madeleine arrived home too late to say goodbye.^[5]

Adulthood

L'Engle attended Smith College from 1937 to 1941. After graduating cum laude from Smith^[6] she moved to an apartment in New York City. In 1942 she met actor Hugh Franklin when she appeared in the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.^[7] L'Engle married Franklin on January 26, 1946, the year after the publication of her first novel, The Small Rain. (Later she wrote of their meeting and marriage, "We met in The Cherry Orchard and were married in The Joyous Season.")^[6] The couple's first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1947.

The family moved to a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in rural Connecticut in 1952. To replace Franklin's lost acting income, they purchased and operated a small general store, while L'Engle continued with her writing. Their son Bion was born that same year.^[8] Four years later, seven-year-old Maria, the daughter of family friends who had died, came to live with the Franklins, and they adopted her shortly thereafter. During this period, L'Engle also served as choir director of the local Congregational Church.^[9]

Career

In 1959 the family returned to New York City so that Hugh could resume his acting career. The move was immediately preceded by a ten-week cross-country camping trip, during which L'Engle first had the idea for her most famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time. L'Engle had completed the book by 1960, but more than two dozen publishers rejected the story before Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally published it in 1962.^[9]

In 1960 the Franklins moved to an apartment in the Cleburne Building on West End Avenue; the apartment was sold by the estate for $4 million in 2008.^[10] From 1960 to 1966 (and again in 1989 and 1990), L'Engle taught at St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's School in New York. In 1965 she became a volunteer librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, also in New York. She later served for many years as writer-in-residence at the Cathedral, generally spending her winters in New York and her summers at Crosswicks.

During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, L'Engle wrote dozens of books for children and adults. One of her books for adults, Two-Part Invention, was a memoir of her marriage, completed after her husband's death from cancer on September 26, 1986.

Later years

L'Engle was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1991, but recovered well enough to visit Antarctica in 1992.^[9] Her son, Bion Franklin, died on December 17, 1999. He was forty-seven years old.

In her final years, L'Engle became unable to travel or teach, due to reduced mobility from osteoporosis, and especially after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in 2002. She also abandoned her former schedule of speaking engagements and seminars. A few compilations of older work, some of it previously unpublished, appeared after 2001.

Madeleine L'Engle died of natural causes at Rose Haven, a nursing facility in Litchfield, Connecticut; close to her home on September 6, 2007, according to a statement by her publicist the following day.^[11] She is buried in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City, New York.

Religious beliefs

L'Engle was an Episcopalian and believed in universal salvation, writing that "All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones."^[12] As a result of her promotion of Christian universalism, many Christian bookstores refused to carry her books, which were also frequently banned from Christian schools and libraries. However, some of her most secular critics attacked her work for being too religious.^[13]

Her views on divine punishment were similar to those of George MacDonald, who also had a large influence on her fictional work. She said "I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love."^[14]

Awards, honors, and organizations

In addition to the numerous awards, medals and prizes won by individual books L'Engle wrote, she personally received many honors over the years.^[9] These included being named an Associate Dame of Justice in the Venerable Order of Saint John (1972);^[15] the USM Medallion from The University of Southern Mississippi (1978), the Smith College Award "for service to community or college which exemplifies the purposes of liberal arts education" (1981), the Sophia Award for distinction in her field (1984), the Regina Medal (1985), the ALAN Award for outstanding contribution to adolescent literature, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English (1986),^[16] and the Kerlan Award (1990).

In 1985 she was a guest speaker at the Library of Congress, giving a speech entitled "Dare to be Creative!" That same year she began a two-year term as president of the Authors Guild. In addition she received over a dozen honorary degrees from as many colleges and universities, such as Haverford College.^[17] Many of these name her as a Doctor of Humane Letters, but she was also made a Doctor of Literature and a Doctor of Sacred Theology, the latter at Berkeley Divinity School in 1984. In 1995 she was Writer in Residence for Victoria Magazine. In 2004 she received the National Humanities Medal, but could not attend the ceremony due to poor health.

The Madeleine L'Engle Collection

Since 1976, Wheaton College in Illinois has maintained a special collection of L'Engle's papers, and a variety of other materials, dating back to 1919.^[18] The Madeleine L'Engle Collection includes manuscripts for the majority of her published and unpublished works, as well as interviews, photographs, audio and video presentations, and an extensive array of correspondence with both adults and children, including artwork sent to her by children.

Bibliographic overview

L'Engle's best-known works are divided between the "Chronos" and "Kairos" frameworks.^[19] The former is the framework in which the stories of the Austin family take place, and is presented in a primarily realistic setting, though occasionally with elements that might be regarded as science fiction. The latter is the framework in which the stories of the Murry and O'Keefe families take place, and is presented sometimes in a realistic setting and sometimes in a more fantastic or magical milieu. Generally speaking, the more realistic kairos material is found in the O'Keefe stories, which deal with the second generation characters. However, the Murry-O'Keefe and Austin families should not be regarded as living in separate worlds, because several characters cross over between them, and historical events are also shared.

In addition to novels and poetry, L'Engle wrote many nonfiction works, including the autobiographical Crosswicks Journals and other explorations of the subjects of faith and art. For L'Engle, who wrote repeatedly about "story as truth," the distinction between fiction and memoir was sometimes blurred. Real events from her life and family history made their way into some of her novels, while fictional elements, such as assumed names for people and places, can be found in her published journals.^[20]

A theme often implied and occasionally explicit in L'Engle's works is that the phenomena that people call religion, science and magic are simply different aspects of a single seamless reality.

Important L'Engle characters

Most of L'Engle's novels from A Wrinkle in Time onward are centered on a cast of recurring characters, who sometimes reappear decades older than when they were first introduced. The "Kairos" books are about the Murry and O'Keefe families, with Meg Murry and Calvin O'Keefe marrying and producing the next generation's protagonist, Polly O'Keefe. L'Engle wrote about both generations concurrently, with Polly (originally called Poly) first appearing in 1965, well before the second book about her parents as teenagers (A Wind in the Door, 1973). The "Chronos" books center on Vicky Austin and her siblings. Although Vicky's appearances all occur during her childhood and teenage years, her sister Suzy also appears as an adult in A Severed Wasp, with a husband and teenage children. In addition, two of L'Engle's early protagonists, Katherine Forrester and Camilla Dickinson, reappear as elderly women in later novels. Rounding out the cast are several characters "who cross and connect", Canon Tallis, Adam Eddington and Zachary Gray, who each appear in both the Kairos and Chronos books.^[19]

Partial list of works

Kairos

• First-generation (Murry) (Time Quartet)
  • A Wrinkle in Time (1962) (Newbery Award Winner) ISBN 0-374-38613-7
  • A Wind in the Door (1973) ISBN 0-374-38443-6
  • A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) ISBN 0-374-37362-0
  • Many Waters (1986) ISBN 0-374-34796-4

• Second-generation (O'Keefe)
  • The Arm of the Starfish (1965) ISBN 0-374-30396-7
  • Dragons in the Waters (1976) ISBN 0-374-31868-9
  • A House Like a Lotus (1984) ISBN 0-374-33385-8
  • An Acceptable Time (1989) ISBN 0-374-30027-5

Chronos

• Meet the Austins (1960) ISBN 0-374-34929-0
• The Moon by Night (1963) ISBN 0-374-35049-3
• The Young Unicorns (1968) ISBN 0-374-38778-8
• A Ring of Endless Light (1980) ISBN 0-374-36299-8 (Newbery Honor Book)
• The Anti-Muffins (1980) ISBN 0-82980415-3
• The Twenty-four Days Before Christmas (1984, ISBN 0-87788-843-4)
• Troubling a Star (1994) ISBN 0-374-37783-9
• A Full House: An Austin Family Christmas (1999, ISBN 0-87788-020-4)

The two Christmas books are shorter works, heavily illustrated but not quite picture books in the sense of having pictures on every page. The events in each of these stories take place prior to the events of Meet the Austins.

Other fiction

Katherine Forrester series:

• The Small Rain (1945), ISBN 0-374-26637-9
• Prelude (1968), no ISBN, an adaptation of the first half of The Small Rain
• A Severed Wasp (1982), ISBN 0-374-26131-8

Camilla Dickinson:

• Camilla Dickinson (1951) ISBN 0-440-01020-9, later republished as Camilla
• A Live Coal in the Sea (1996) ISBN 0-374-18989-7

Single titles:

• Ilsa (1946) (no ISBN)
• And Both Were Young (1949), ISBN 0-440-90229-0
• A Winter's Love (1957), ISBN 0-345-30644-9
• The Love Letters (1966), revised and reissued as Love Letters (2000), ISBN 0-87788-528-1
• The Other Side Of The Sun (1971) ISBN 0-374-22805-1
• Dance in the Desert (1969, 1988), ISBN 0-374-41684-2
• Certain Women (1992, 1996) ISBN 0-374-12025-0
• The Joys of Love (2008) ISBN 0-374-33870-1^[21]

(Note: some ISBNs given are for later paperback editions, since no such numbering existed when L'Engle's earlier titles were published in hardcover.)

The Crosswicks Journals

• A Circle of Quiet (1972), ISBN 0-374-12374-8
• The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974), ISBN 0-374-27174-7
• The Irrational Season (1977), ISBN 0-374-17733-3
• Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (1988), ISBN 0-374-28020-7

The Genesis Trilogy

• And It Was Good (1983) ISBN 0-87788-046-8
• A Stone For A Pillow (1986) ISBN 0-87788-789-6
• Sold Into Egypt (1989) ISBN 0-87788-766-7

Poetry

• Lines Scribbled On An Envelope (1969)
• The Weather Of The Heart (1978)
• A Cry Like A Bell (1987)
• The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005) (includes reprints from the above)

Religion, the arts, and more autobiography

• Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (1982)
• The Glorious Impossible (1990) ISBN 0671686909

ISBN 978-0671686901

• The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)
• Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and other Spiritual Places (1996, 2003)
• Friends For The Journey (1997)(co-writer) ISBN 0892839864
• Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation (2001) ISBN 0877880794
• Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life (2001) Compiled by Carole Chase. ISBN 0-87788-157-X

Further reading

• Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life by Madeleine L'Engle and Carole F. Chase ISBN 0-87788-157-X
• Scholastic BookFiles: A Reading Guide to A Wrinkle in Time ISBN 0-439-46364-5
• Christian Mythmakers: C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton and Others by Rolland Hein ISBN 0-940895-48-X

References

External links

• L'Engle's official site
• Madeleine L'Engle at FSG
• Obituary in The Times 25 September 2007
• Madeleine L'Engle, author of the Wrinkle in Time Quintet
• ‘I Dare You’ Madeleine L'Engle on God, The Da Vinci Code and aging well Newsweek
• L'Engle's site at WaterBrook Press
• Madeleine L'Engle Papers: About the Author - Wheaton College
• "The Storyteller," The New Yorker, April 12, 2004
• Works by or about Madeleine L'Engle in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Fantasy and Faith, First Things, November 2007

From Wikiquote

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is...

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-11-29 – 2007-09-06), born Madeleine L'Engle Camp, was an American writer and poet best known for her children's books, including the Newbery Medal-winning winning A Wrinkle in Time.

Sourced

It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part
of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart,
And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join:
Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.

• I endeavor
  To hold the I as one only for the cloud
  Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed
  To be responsible. Its light against my face
  Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place
  Singing, each compassed by the rest,
  The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least.
  It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part
  of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart,
  And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join:
  Joy orders the disunity until the song is one.
  • "Instruments" in The Weather of the Heart (1978)

• We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…
  • The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)

• All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.
  • As quoted in If Grace Is True : Why God Will Save Every Person (2003) by Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, p. 223. Originally from A Stone for a Pillow

• Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
  • The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005)

A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

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

• Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.
  • Mrs Whatsit, Ch. 1

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

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

• Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure.

• As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers

• You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

• Alike and Equal are not the same.

• Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate.

• Suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's. And she had her love for them. But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?

The Crosswicks Journal

A Circle of Quiet (1972)

The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.

• The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself.
  • Section 1.3

• When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we escape our self-conscious selves.
  • Section 1.3

• The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily.
  • Section 1.5

• My husband is my most ruthless critic. ... Sometimes he will say, "It's been said better before." Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.
  • Section 1.9

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

• Here we are living in a world of "identity crises," and most of us have no idea what an identity is.
  Half the problem is that an identity is something which must be understood intuitively, rather than in terms of provable fact. An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy.
  • Section 1.10

We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.

• We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
  We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. ... I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. 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.
  • Section 1.10

• I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.
  • Section 1.14

• The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
  • Section 1.14

• It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it.
  • Section 1.16

• How do we teach a child — our own, or those in a classroom — to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have — or need — answers.
  • Section 1.16

• Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved.
  • Section 1.16

• When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world.
  All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.
  • Section 1.16

Nothing important is completely explicable.

• Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.
  • Section 1.16

• We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.
  • Section 2.2

• It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God.
  • Section 2.5

• Nothing important is completely explicable.
  • Section 3.9

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it...

• The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
  • Section 3.13

• St. John said, "And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it ( I need the double meaning here of comprehend). This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take us.
  • Section 3.13

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.

• "Why do you write for children?" My immediate response to this question is, "I don't." ... If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
  Sometimes I answer that 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. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it's perfectly true. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in Wrinkle, not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it.
  • Section 4.4

• A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.
  It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two.
  • Section 4.5

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

• What can we give a child when there is nothing left?
  All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.
  • Section 4.6

• I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. I don't need to know the difference between a children's book and an adult one; it's the questions that have come from thinking about it that are important. I wish we'd stop finding answers for everything. One of the reasons my generation has mucked up the world to such an extent is our loss of the sense of the mysterious.
  • Section 4.8

• I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise...
  • Section 4.10

In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

• All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.
  • Section 4.14

• Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
  Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
  Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.
  • Section 4.21

After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light.

• Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light.
  The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way.
  • Section 4.22

The Irrational Season (1977)

A comprehensible God is no more than an idol.

• My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and. . . . For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.

• We rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol.

• 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.

• 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.

• If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive. If a friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it should be cut out, and quickly.

• No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.

The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.

• My young friend who was taught that she was so sinful the only way an angry God could be persuaded to forgive her was by Jesus dying for her, was also taught that part of the joy of the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy. But it is a belief limited not only to the more rigid sects. I know a number of highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who consider as a heresy my faith that God's loving concern for his creation will outlast all our willfulness and pride. No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of love... Origen held this belief and was ultimately pronounced a heretic. Gregory of Nyssa, affirming the same loving God, was made a saint. Some people feel it to be heresy because it appears to deny man his freedom to refuse to love God. But this, it seems to me, denies God his freedom to go on loving us beyond all our willfulness and pride. If the Word of God is the light of the world, and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the dark corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be given the grace to respond with love — and of our own free will.

• I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.

Fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.

• If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends

• I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know.

• One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.

• One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.

Walking on Water (1980)

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

• It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists.

A Ring of Endless Light (1980)

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

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate.

Penguins and Golden Calves : Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places

• 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.

• There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate.

• I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.

• I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing."

• A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened.

• Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you."

• I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

Newsweek interview (2004)

"'I Dare You' : Madeleine L’Engle on God, The Da Vinci Code and aging well", an interview with Melinda Henneberger, Newsweek (7 May 2004)

• I sometimes think God is a s--t — and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s--t.

• It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.... I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah... Faith is best expressed in story.

• Henneberger: If the Bible is not literally true, does that mean we don’t need to take it seriously?
  L'Engle: Oh no, you do, because it’s truth, not fact, and you have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Madeleine L'Engle

• L'Engle's Official Site
• L'Engle's site at WaterBrook Press
• The Tesseract: A Madeleine L'Engle Bibliography in 5 Dimensions
• Profile at Wheaton College
• Brief biography and bibliography at Fantastic Fiction
• Brief biography at the My Hero project
• "'I Dare You' : Madeleine L'Engle on God, 'The Da Vinci Code' and aging well" by Melinda Henneberger in Newsweek (6 May 2006)