Quotes from An Acceptable Time

Madeleine L'Engle ·  343 pages

Rating: (16.5K votes)


“Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from An Acceptable Time


“My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from An Acceptable Time


“But if I knew everything, there would be no wonder, because what I believe in is far more than I know.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from An Acceptable Time


“My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business...”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from An Acceptable Time


“Okay, Polly,” her grandfather said. “Let’s have some normal, ordinary lesson time. What is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, quote from An Acceptable Time



About the author

Madeleine L'Engle
Born place: in New York City, New York, The United States
Born date November 29, 1918
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“There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding forever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered.”
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