A Circle of Quiet Quotes

“...Alan, the first winter we knew him, stood at my desk in the Cathedral library and remarked, "I think you and Hugh live more existentially than most people."

I felt we'd made it: we, like Sartre and Camus and Kierkegaard, were existential; we were really with it. It doesn't matter that I'm still not quite sure what living existentially means, though I have a suspicion that it's not far from living ontologically, because it's one of those words that's outside the realm of provable fact and touches on mystery. Nothing important is completely explicable.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“It's a stage we all go through; it takes a certain amount of living to strike the strange balance between the two errors either of regarding ourselves as unforgivable or as not needing forgiveness.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“I don’t go along with the people who say they’d never want to live their childhoods again; I treasure every bit of mine, all the pains as well as the joy of discovery. But I also love being a grownup. To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven’t lost any of my past, and am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look towards the future.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Like”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“When I am stuck in writing a book, when I am stuck in a problem in life, if I go to the piano and play Bach for an hour, the problem is usually either resolved or accepted.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“The Greeks in their wisdom had four words for our one, love: there was charity, agapé; sexual love, eros; family love, storgé; friendship, philia.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“We must not take from our children—or ourselves—the truth that is in the world of the imagination.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“I’m convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we’ve made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors; as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“We tend, today, to want to have a road map of exactly where we are going. We want to know whether or not we have succeeded in everything we do. It’s all right to want to know—we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t—but we also have to understand that a lot of the time we aren’t going to know.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“The better word, of course, is joy, because it doesn’t have anything to do with pain, physical or spiritual. I have been wholly in joy when I have been in pain—childbirth is the obvious example. Joy is what has made the pain bearable and, in the end, creative rather than destructive.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“the European attitude that the very young can be charming and delightful and pretty but only a mature woman can be beautiful; and only a mature man can be strong enough to be truly tender.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody—away from all these people I love most in the world—in order to regain a sense of proportion.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“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 that 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.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“I love anything that is going to make language richer and stronger. But when words are used in a way that is going to weaken language, it has nothing to do with the beautiful way that they can wriggle and wiggle and develop and enrich our speech, but instead it is impoverishing, diminishing. If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free—though we may buy more of the product.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“We can’t absorb it all. We know too much, too quickly, and one of the worst effects of this avalanche of technology is the loss of compassion.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Our children have never known a world without machines: dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, electric beaters, blenders, furnaces, electric pumps, saws, computers—there are more machines than we can possibly count; beware, beware, lest they take us over.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a sense of family, of belonging to each other.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“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.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“I wish that we were worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet