Madeleine L'Engle

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

Alleluia! We do not have to be right! We do have to love, to be vulnerable, to accept joy and pain, and to grow through them.

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

If we aren't capable of being hurt we aren't capable of feeling joy.

So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.

Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

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

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

A life lived in chaos is an impossibility...

It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.

An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world.

The novel we sit down to write, and the one we end up writing may be very different, just as the Jesus we grasp and the Jesus who grasps us may also differ.

Sometimes our freedom comes in the way we accept things over which we have no control, things which may cause us great pain and even death.

If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear.

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.