Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

It's all very simple. But maybe because it's so simple, it's also hard.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

The Simple Life is not a simple life.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

Prayer is simple, as simple as a child making known its wants to it parents.

Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.

Nothing's that simple, not even things that are simply awful.

I understand that we are actually complicated people but we are also dreadfully simple.

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.

A songwriter's supreme challenge is being complex and simple at the same time

It is a simple procedure to calculate the number of seeds in an apple. But who among us can ever say how many apples are in a seed?

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.