Daily Inspiration Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

A stingingly polite confession: the speaker doesn’t accuse the other person of changing, failing, or deceiving. They accuse themselves of a more intimate violence - choosing fantasy over reality, then calling it love, concern, or principle. The line is built on a ruthless bit of grammar. “Because” pretends to offer a rational explanation, but what follows is an ethical indictment. The cause isn’t the other’s behavior; it’s the speaker’s appetite for control. “Not what I would have you be” gives away the real project: remaking a human being into a preferred draft.

Then comes the turn that makes it land: “I blind myself.” Not “I don’t see,” not “I misunderstand,” but an active, willed self-mutilation. L’Engle understands how people protect their idealized narratives by sabotaging perception. The blindness isn’t ignorance; it’s maintenance. It’s the psychic cost of insisting that someone fit a role - child, partner, believer, hero - when their actual self is messier, freer, or simply different.

The subtext is relational and spiritual at once, very much in L’Engle’s wheelhouse: the sin isn’t disobedience, it’s refusal of personhood. “Who, in truth, you are” carries a moral pressure. Truth exists; it’s available; the speaker is the one turning away. In families, communities, and faith traditions, this dynamic is painfully common: disappointment masquerading as discernment, judgment dressed up as standards. L’Engle’s intent is corrective - a warning that the quickest way to lose someone is to love an idea of them more than their lived reality.