Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

What signifies the sound of words in prayer without the affection of the heart, and a sedulous application of the proper means that may naturally lead us to such an end?

Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.

May our prayers today, and every day, be from our hearts and with the focus of our whole being.

Sometimes you may feel very sad, because sadness also belongs to God. Sadness is also divine. There is no necessity to always be happy. Then sadness is your prayer. Then let your heart cry and let your eyes pour down tears. Then let sadness be offered to God. Whatsoever is there in your heart, let it be offered to the Divine Feet - joy or sadness, sometimes even anger.

I'm not somebody that keeps the thing in her heart. I can get very angry for five minutes, but then it's finished. Once I've yelled, it's over.

‎Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me.

You are a slave of what you need in your soul.

He prays best who, not asking God to do man's work, prays penitence, prays resolutions, and then prays deeds--thus supplicating with heart and head and hands.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

Humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep.

Anger is active sadness; sadness is inactive anger. They are not two things. Watch your own behaviour. When do you find yourself sad? You find yourself sad only in situations where you cannot be angry. The boss in the office says something and you cannot be angry; it is uneconomical. You cannot be angry and you have to go on smiling - then you become sad. The energy has become inactive. You come home, and with your wife you find a small thing, anything irrelevant, and you become angry.

There are ideas in our hearts, there are wishes, there are aspirations, there are groanings, there are sighings that the world knows nothing about; but God knows them. So words are not always necessary. When we cannot express our feelings except in wordless groanings, God knows exactly what is happening.

I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.

Crying is personal. On the other hand, laughing is more general . Laughing makes our hearts wider.

A lot of the time it feels like… music is some sort of excuse to be a human. It’s kind of like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

All these feelings need to be felt. We need to stomp and storm; to sob and cry; to perspire and tremble.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

MOUTH, n. In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of the heart.

It is not the mouth that is the main thing to be looked at in prayer, but whether the heart is so full of affection and earnestness in prayer with God, that it is impossible to express their sense and desire; for then a man desires indeed, when his desires are so strong, many, and mighty, that all the words, tears, and groans that can come from the heart, cannot utter them.

I haven't written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I-nor for that matter anyone else-will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen -year -old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

You need to open up your soul and have a weep-a-thon.