The Summer of the Great-Grandmother Quotes

“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“I used to feel guilty about spending morning hours working on a book; about fleeing to the brook in the afternoon. It took several summers of being totally frazzled by September to make me realize that this was a false guilt. I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited. They are not. The time at the typewriter and the time at the brook refresh me and put me into a more workable perspective.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“It's a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It's a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven't I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I 'believe' for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“But I did feel, and passionately, that it wasn't fair of God to give us brains enough to ask the ultimate questions if he didn't intend to teach us the answers.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“The refusal to love is the only unbearable thing.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to be stopped. It's all crazy.

. . . Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but *he* is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“One of the problems of being a storyteller is the cultivated ability to extrapolate; in every situation all the what ifs come to me.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“Yet there are times when for no logical reason I feel an almost unbearable sense of isolation. Not only am I divided in myself, my underwater and above-water selves separated, but I feel wrenched away from everybody around me. This is part of being human, this knowing that we are all part of one another, inextricably involved; and at the same time alone, irrevocably alone.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. It stops us from taking anything for granted. It has also taught me about living in the immediate moment.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“In a reverse way, sharing my mother's long, slow dying consumes my creative energy. I manage one angry and bitter story, and feel better for it, but most of me is involved in Mother's battle. Watching her slowly being snuffed out is the opposite of pregnancy, depleting instead of fulfilling: I am exhausted by conflict.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“He is: frog: unworried by the self-consciousness with which the human animal is stuck; it is our blessing and our curse; not only do we know, we know that we know. And we are not often willing to face how little we know.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“The fairy godmother or guardian angel bestows on each infant a unique gift, a gift to which the child will be responsible: a gift of healing; a gift for growing green things; a gift for painting, for cooking, for cleaning; a gift for loving.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“I tell a friend that I hope for Mother's death, and he is shocked; he sees it as a failure in my love toward her.

Perhaps it is. I don't know.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

“i am only beginning to realize how fragmented and uncoordinated I am. My left hand does not know what my right hand is doing. My heart tells me to go in one direction, and my mind another, and I do not know which to obey. I am furious with Mother for not being my mother, and I am filled with an aching tenderness I have never known before. There are rough waters below the surface of my consciousness, and strange, submarine winds. The submerged me is more aware of wild tides and undertows than the surface. One deep calls another, because of the noise of the water floods; all the waves and storms are gone over me. And above the surface the brazen sun shines, heat shimmers on the hills, and the long fronds of the golden willow Mother planted ten or more years ago droop in the stillness.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother