Daily Inspiration Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

Choice is L'Engle's quiet revolt against every system that wants to tidy up the human mess. "It is the ability to choose which makes us human" lands with the moral clarity of a children’s novelist who never condescended to children: she’s not praising intelligence, strength, or purity. She’s naming agency as the real dividing line, and she’s doing it in a way that subtly indicts any worldview that treats people as programmable.

The line’s strength is its grammar. Not "the choices we make", which would drag in outcomes and judgment, but "the ability to choose" - capacity over performance, dignity over résumé. That shift matters in L'Engle’s universe, where young protagonists are repeatedly told (by adults, institutions, even cosmic forces) that there’s only one acceptable path. Her work, especially in the A Wrinkle in Time lineage, pits the soul against smooth, seductive conformity: the totalitarian promise that if you surrender decision-making, you’ll be safe, efficient, relieved of doubt.

Subtext: humanity isn’t a category you’re born into and get to keep automatically. It’s a practice. Choice implies risk, error, and moral responsibility; it also implies imagination, the ability to picture alternatives and then pay the cost of selecting one. In a 20th-century context shaped by mass persuasion, bureaucratic power, and Cold War-era anxieties about conformity, L'Engle is drawing a bright line: the enemy isn’t just oppression. It’s the soft, anesthetic temptation to stop choosing at all.