Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

Can the child within my heart rise above Can I sail through the changing ocean tides Can I handle the seasons of my life Well, I've been afraid of changing 'Cause I've built my life around you But time makes you get bolder Even children get older And I'm getting older too

It is a good thing to learn the truth one's self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

You don't become a fully-formed human as a female, or even a male, until you're at least 30.

The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.

I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age - when you are going through something like that - the genre is so meaningful.

For a lot of people going through their first love, you're both still figuring yourself out.

The good part about getting older is you stop trying to prove anything to anyone, including yourself. All you are in the pursuit of is collecting experiences - beautiful, fragile little soap bubbles that you store in your heart, and every once in a while you pull one out and gaze at the delicate pictures it shows you.

We all have monsters inside of us, and we all have an inner child in us. You always think about your inner child as being the sweet and innocent part of yourself, but it's also the part that's all ego with the mentality of, "If the world isn't pleasing me, it isn't doing its job."

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.

You make your own kinds of mistakes, and I’m sure you’ll have your share of regrets in life. But commitment was never your problem, sweetie. You have a better chance of making this work than most forty-year-olds I know. My little middle-aged child. Luckily, you seem to have found another old soul.

I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days.

I am all the ages I've ever been.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

When we were children, there was a silent part of us watching the child. When we were adolescents, there was that same witness watching the adolescent. Middle age, and so on. Every one, now and again, has discovered the self, the one who is watching.

I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky.

I want to try to not be the child that had to go through too much too young. I want to be who I am now and not who I was then.

Where was he, her Alexander, of once? Was he truly gone? The Alexander of the Summer Garden, of their first Lazarevo days, of the hat in his hands, white toothed, peaceful, laughing, languid, stunning Alexander, had he been left far behind? Well, Tatiana supposed that was only right. For Alexander believed his Tatiana of once was gone, too. The swimming child Tatiana of the Luga, of the Neva, of the River Kama. Perhaps on the surface they were still in their twenties, but their hearts were old.