Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

The line is spoken by Mrs. Whatsit, one of the three mysterious, otherworldly guides (with Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which) in Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s science-fantasy novel *A Wrinkle in Time* (1962). Mrs. Whatsit offers it as a piece of moral instruction to Meg Murry and her companions as they confront forces that threaten individuality and freedom. L’Engle, who often blended Christian theology, ethics, and literary allusion in her fiction, uses the sonnet comparison to frame human life as structured yet creative—an argument against passive conformity and for responsible choice within given limits.

The metaphor treats a human life as a poem with constraints: “rules” and “obligations” resemble a sonnet’s fixed meter and rhyme scheme, while “freedoms” point to the expressive possibilities that remain inside that form. The quote suggests that meaning is not handed to us ready-made; we inherit conditions—family, society, mortality, moral law—but we still author our responses. In the novel’s larger conflict between individuality and enforced sameness, the sonnet image defends disciplined creativity: freedom is not the absence of structure, but the capacity to choose, love, and act well within it.