1
" But we outgrow this spontaneity and forget the completeness of the circle of blessing. Once again we have come to think of happiness as material prosperity, as affluence. This is the consumer mentality, and is how Madison Avenue would have us think. When we have been turned into consumers we are lowered from being men and women, thinking human beings. Far too often we fall for the not-very-subtle temptation: the more we consume, the happier (more blessed) we will be: more cornflakes, Tang, Preparation-H, automobiles, washing machines, aspirin, Exedrin, Drano, Tide, Bufferin—but it gives us headaches, not happiness. Happiness comes to the poor in spirit. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention
2
" There are three ways you can live life—three again—remember that the great writers almost always do things in threes. You can live life as though it’s all a cosmic accident; we’re nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth. Maybe you can live your life as though everything’s a bad joke. I can’t.” They couldn’t, either, though for some of the kids who sat around the table that day not much had happened to make them think that life is anything else. “Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he’s aloof perfection, impassible, indifferent to his creation. He doesn’t care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference. You don’t matter to him, I don’t matter to him, except possibly as a means to an end. I can’t live that way, either.” Again there was general agreement. “Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention
5
" It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody 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 our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out 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. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention
6
" Death is the most ordinary thing in the world, and so is birth. Someone is being born at this very moment. Someone is dying. Ordinary, and yet completely extraordinary. The marvel of having my babies is something I will never forget. The feeling of staggering uniqueness I had at the death of my father, the death of several close friends, was very different, but equally acute. Death may be an ordinary, everyday affair, but it is not a statistic. It is something that happens to people. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention
9
" The writer of fiction—and I include in this all the works of the imagination, poetry, plays, realistic novels, fantasy—may never tell; he must show, and show through the five senses. “Describe this room in which we’re sitting,” I say, “and make use of all five of your senses. Don’t tell us. Show us.” The beginning writer finds this difficult. I have to repeat and repeat: fiction is built upon the concrete. A news article is essentially transitory and may be built upon sand. The house of fiction must be built upon rock. Feel, smell, taste, hear, see: show it. Dante says: “You cannot understand what I write unless you understand it in a fourfold way: on the literal level, the moral level, the allegorical level, and the anagogical level. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention
10
" Sometimes I think that we have forgotten how to be truly happy, we are so conditioned to look for instant gratification. Thus we confuse happiness with transitory pleasures, with self-indulgence. How, in fact, can we live happily when we are surrounded on all sides by so much pain and misery? War and alarums of war, earthquake, flood, drought. Crime is rising; anger and frustration burst into violence, and violence itself becomes a perverse form of gratification. What is this blessedness, this promised happiness? What, if we follow the directions given us in the Beatitudes, is expected of us?—not a general ‘us,’ but each one of us in all our particularity. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention
13
" love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take; and I must love her enough, when the time comes, to let her go into a new birth, a new life of which I can know nothing, and which I cannot prove; a new life which may not be; but of which I have had enough intimations so that I cannot discount its possibility, no matter how difficult such a possibility is for the intellect. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention