# Penguins and Golden Calves - Author: [Madeleine L’Engle](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle.md) - Quotes: 7 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves ## Quotes > Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/kids-dont-hesitate.md) > There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/theres-more-to-life.md) > A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/a-wrinkle-in-time.md) > I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/i-really-enjoy.md) > I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/i-have-advice.md) > I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/i-wrote-a-wrinkle.md) > I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn't get along together, and what made people tick. That's why I started to write stories. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/madeleine-lengle/penguins-and-golden-calves/i-wrote-because.md)