Daily Inspiration Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

L'Engle frames the artist not as a serene conduit but as a contested territory. The artistic temperament is "a battleground" because creation, in her view, isn’t merely additive; it’s forged under pressure from impulses that can just as easily sabotage as spark. The image of two angels wrestling sharpens the drama: both forces feel intimate, even holy, which is the unnerving point. Destruction isn’t an outside villain; it arrives with the authority and familiarity of an angel. Creativity, too, isn’t pure sunshine; it has to fight for airtime.

The phrase "sometimes seems" matters. L'Engle isn’t romanticizing dysfunction as a requirement for art, nor is she diagnosing artists as doomed. She’s naming a recognizable pattern: the same sensitivity that makes a person porous enough to notice beauty can also make them vulnerable to despair, self-critique, compulsion, or the seductive clarity of giving up. By casting the struggle in spiritual terms, she sidesteps the modern urge to reduce everything to productivity hacks or pathology. The stakes are moral and existential: what you feed wins.

Contextually, L'Engle wrote from a 20th-century Christian-inflected imagination that takes mystery seriously without abandoning craft. Her novels often insist that darkness and light coexist, and that choosing creativity is an act of resistance. The wrestling suggests no final victory, only ongoing work: art as a daily decision to let the bright angel get a grip.