“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Like and equal are not the same thing at all.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“People are more than just the way they look.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Only a fool is not afraid.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space."
"Oh," the thin beast said. "Aren't they lonely?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“We do not know what things look like.
We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Euripedes. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Calvin said, "Do you know that this is the first time I've seen you without your glasses?"
"I'm blind as a bat without them. I'm near-sighted, like father."
"Well, you know what, you've got dream-boat eyes," Calvin said. "Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“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.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“Itt iss Eevill…"
"What is going to happen?"
"Wee wwill cconnttinnue tto ffightt!"…
"And we’re not alone, you know, children," came Mrs.Whatsit, the comforter. "…some of the best fighters have come from your own planet…"
"Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked.
"Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs.Whatsit said. Mrs.Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly.
"And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
“I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Born place: in New York City, New York, The United States
Born date November 29, 1918
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“In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins."
And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.”
― David Sedaris, quote from When You Are Engulfed in Flames
“And so whether you were six with the chicken pox, nine with the flu, twelve with a broken arm, or fifteen with menstrual cramps, you could count on sixty solid minutes with the company of that old seventies set, lots of one-dollar bets, and advice to neuter your pet, all crunched into the best sick-day game show yet!”
― Neil Pasricha, quote from The Book of Awesome
“And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. “I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.” But”
― Simon Winchester, quote from The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
“Do you know how some people can do anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you tell them to write a tune, they give you a symphony right there. You tell them to write a book, they write you a novel in a day. You tell them to move a spoon without touching it, they move it. If they want something, they make it happen. Miracles, almost.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, quote from Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception
“قد علمتني الحياة أنه حين يراك الآخرون متحمساً، تفتر حماستهم هم، والعكس صحيح . لذا كلما ازدادت رغبتي بأمر ما، تصنّعت بروداً أعظم حياله .”
― Hanif Kureishi, quote from The Buddha of Suburbia
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