Ilsa Quotes

“I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“nothing in the chemical world vanishes. Everything that is in the world remains in some form or other. Decaying matter turns into mould and gases and is regenerated and becomes living matter again. I had come home from school and realized that that was what must happen to the human body after death. Even if the soul went to heaven, the body would become part of the earth again, of sand and wind and trees and sea. Standing in Uncle Montgomery’s ill-lighted front hall, while the houseboy went to announce us, I thought that it must be the same way with thoughts and emotions. All the powers of evil and good we let loose are freed into the world forever. Every will to hurt, to cause pain—every time we are shaken by anger—that fury, that cruelty, remains forever. I”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“Or don’t allow yourself to want something you’re not going to have the courage to accept when you get it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“I was just laughing because I felt good. You act as though you keep expecting people to laugh at you. You ought to just laugh at them. I’ll bet they’re funnier than you are.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“In this way I have sat in many rooms and walked in many gardens, and it has been as though I were a stick of furniture or a branch of a tree. I seem to have caused no sense of restraint or embarrassment. People have been able to talk freely in front of me, almost as freely as though I weren’t there. I suppose some might think this a great compliment; it has given me a curious feeling of nonexistence. Now”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“All my life the people I have loved—Ilsa, Cousin Anna, Silver, Myra Turnbull, Joshua Tisbury—have accepted me as a friend, have confided in me—but, somehow, there has been no actual contact made. It has been almost as though they could talk to me because I didn’t exist. I think that’s because there has been no give and take. I have a pitcher into which the people I love have poured themselves. I have accepted everything and been allowed to give nothing. When they discover that I have passions of my own it seems to jar them. In”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“I was only just beginning to realize what a horribly destructive thing hate is, how it destroys inwards as well as outwards. I”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“But she was one of those people who change very little between twenty and sixty. Instead of growing and developing into whatever kind of creatures they are, slowly and consistently, they have three periods of their lives, with sharp lines of demarcation between them: they are children, then grownups, then old men and women. Suddenly”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa

“It seemed strange that with so much softness in her actual construction Mamma gave such a feeling of hardness. When”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Ilsa