N.D. Wilson famous quotes

Every rock is spoon by the Word. Every time I touch a stone, I am touching the Voice of God. Every cell of me is crafted by that artistry. My life is His breath. But we mortals grow numb. We want to feel more. And so we add MSG to our earthly brands of holiness.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Cells #Voice #Rocks

The moon was up, painting the world silver, making things look just a little more alive.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Moon #Alive #World

In this story, the sun moves. In this story, every night meets a dawn and burns away in the bright morning. In this story, Winter can never hold back the Spring... He is the best of all possible audiences, the only Audience to see every scene, the Author who became a Character and heaped every shadow on Himself. The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter. Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Morning #Spring #Moving

Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Courage #Believe #Hero

Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shenikah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Children #Eye #Laughing

Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Evil #Important #Sometimes

The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not try to pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Children #Laughter #Eye

Narrative living is the beginning of rhetoric.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Narrative #Rhetoric

Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain - they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Laughter #Hands #Bones

Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Wine #Wind #Rivers

Stealing ideas from contemporaries is rude and tasteless. Stealing from the long dead is considered literary and admirable. The same is true of grave-robbing. Loot your local cemetery and find yourself mired in social awkwardness. But unearth the tomb of an ancient king and you can feel free to pop off his toe rings. You'll probably end up on a book tour, or bagging an honorary degree or two.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Kings #Book #Ideas

I am here to paint you a picture of the world I see
-- N.D. Wilson

#World #Paint

I've watched goldfish make babies, and ants execute earwigs. I've seen a fly deliver live young while having its head eaten by a mantis. And I had a golden retriever behave like one.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Baby #Goldfish #Golden

Stories are like catechisms, but they're catechisms for your impulses, they're catechisms with flesh on.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Flesh #Stories #Catechism

Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Sacrifice #Giving #Glory

In the Darwinian world, self-preservation is the ultimate shiny good.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Self #World #Preservation

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Epic #Self #Mountain

To love is to be selfless. To be selfless is to be fearless. To be fearless is to strip your enemies of their greatest weapon. Even if they break our bodies and drain our blood, we are unvanquished. Our goal was never to live; our goal is to love. It is the goal of all truly noble men and women. Give all that can be given. Give even your life itself.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Love Is #Men #Blood

If God gives you (or makes you) a joke, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Laugh.) If God gives you an obstacle, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Climb it. Then laugh.) If God gives you more profound hardship, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Climb it. Then laugh. Exhibit A: His Son.)
-- N.D. Wilson

#Son #Giving #Profound

Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Philosophy #Opiates #Wonder

God's big enough that small doesn't matter.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Matter #Enough #Bigs

The world is R-rated, and no one's checking IDs
-- N.D. Wilson

#World

Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Sides #Firsts #Do Not Fear

Every four years, I'll watch figure skating, but I'm no closer to buying tights.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Years #Watches #Tights

Spring is worth the wait. Life is worth the death.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Spring #Waiting #Life Is

Summer has come with the loveliness of a mother Heat, not warmth, now pours onto my face, aging me, taking me closer to death. Let it. I am here to live my story, to love my story. I will not fail to savor any gift out of a desire for self-preservation. Self-preservation is not a great virtue in this story.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Summer #Mother #Self

Mumbling priests swinging stick cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Doctors #Elephants #Magic

But God never seems capable of moderation
-- N.D. Wilson

#Moderation #Capable

We grasp because God does. We create, and fall short, because God does. We continue creating because we fell short, and fall short again, because God does. Because one act of creation, one attempt at capture, is only one breath and we must breathe again. And again. And again. Here we stand (and sit and sleep), the many images of the Imager, and we can do no other.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Fall #Sleep #Creating

God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child's smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Girl #Children #Eye

Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.)
-- N.D. Wilson

#Sorry #Plato #Philosophy

Truth: We are the present. We are now. We are the razor's edge of history. The future flies at us and from that dark blur we shape the past. And the past is forever.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Dark #Past #Forever

Living is the same thing as dying. Living well is the same thing as dying for others.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Dying #Live Well #Wells

The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Rising #Truth Is #Scales

Here Spring just grows and greens and warms, spreading life, wrapping us in her arms, until suddenly we realize that she's not a girl anymore. She's a woman. A woman named Summer.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Summer #Girl #Spring

Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb. You should look under the bed.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Cousin #Men #Looks

Your father died for me, and dying with you would be an honor, though not as great as dying to save you.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Father #Honor #Dying

Caves and darkness can't hold you when you die, they can only hold your bones.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Darkness #Caves #Bones

You fainted,' Tom said. Reg coughed. No, I didn't,' he said. 'Women faint. People afraid of needles faint. Men black out.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Men #People #Black

Hold your tongue if you'd like to keep it." - Jaques
-- N.D. Wilson

#Tongue

Kansas is not easily impressed. It has seen houses fly and cattle soar. When funnel clouds walk through the wheat, big hail falls behind. As the biggest stones melt, turtles and mice and fish and even men can be seen frozen inside. And Kansas is not surprised. Henry York had seen things in Kansas, things he didn't think belonged in this world. Things that didn't. Kansas hadn't flinched.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Fall #Men #Thinking

What I say is, don't go playing unless you can win. Only sit down to chess with idiots, only kick a dog what's dead already, and don't love a lady unless she loves you first.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Dog #Love You #Winning

Self-loathing and self-worship can easily be the same thing. You hate the small sack of fluids and resentments that you are, and you would go to any length, and betray anything and anyone, to preserve it.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Hate #Self #Loathing

Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Running #Epic #Climbing

After three years down here, I've not learned too much. But one thing I do know is that our bellies aren't big enough for revenge. It turns sour and eats you up. We'll get out, but we'll get out for the sun, the moon, and mothers, not for small-souled enemies, though we'll deal with them when we get there.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Mother #Revenge #Moon

Tom had traveled around the sun eleven times when the delivery truck brought his mother's newest fridge, but a number doesn't really describe his age.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Mother #Numbers #Age

In the history of the world there have been lots of onces and lots of times, and every time has had a once upon it. Most people will tell you that the once upon a time happened in a land far, far away, but it really depends on where you are. The once upon a time may have been just outside your back door. It may have been beneath your very feet. It might not have been in a land at all but deep in the sea's belly or bobbing around on its back.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Sea #Land #Feet

After a few mouthfuls of moon-flavored air, even the stubbornly drowsy can find themselves wide-eyed.. All the normal noises of life were gone, leaving behind the secretive sounds, the shy sounds, the whispers and conversations of moss disputing with grass over some soft piece of earth, or the hummingbird snoring.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Moon #Air #Leaving

Columbus was the first to come to the east. Vikings don't count, and neither do all the people who were standing on the beaches and waving when he got here.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Beach #People #Firsts

Your life is your own, your glory is your glory, but you will lose it if you keep it for yourself. Grasp it for the sake of others...
-- N.D. Wilson

#Sake #Life Is #Glory

We're all carnies, though some people are in denial. They want to be above it all, above the mayhem of laughter and people and lights and animals and the dark sadness that lurks in the coners and beneath the rides and in the trailers after hours. So they ride teh Ferris wheel, and at the top, they think they've left it all behind They've ascended to a place where they can take things seriously. Where they can be taken seriously.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Laughter #Taken #Sadness

That wasn't me. I'm not a morning person. There's another person inside of me that does all the morning things.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Morning #Doe #Persons

Writer's block — so what? Write something bad. Just throw it in the trash can when you're done, you're always improving. That kind of writing is like doing a bunch of push-ups. Every individual push-up is not the important thing. On Tuesday you're going to think, "Is it really important that I do it today?" No, but the collective impact is. If you write every day, you will improve.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Block #Writing #Thinking

The fall of man did not introduce evil; it placed us on the wrong side of it, under its rule, needing rescue.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Fall #Men #Evil

Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Stories #Mouths #Life Is

It is hard to stay focused with so much swirling around me. God is distracting. He never stops talking, and I can never stop listening. There is a reason we sleep.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Sleep #Talking #Listening

Do you dislike your role in the story, your place in the shadow? What complaints do you have that the hobbits could not have heaved at Tolkien? You have been born into a narrative, you have been given freedom. Act, and act well until you reach your final scene.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Shadow #Finals #Roles

Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded--under torch and hammer and chisel--into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Fighting #Men #Battle

In Bright Shadow: C.S. Lewis on the Imagination for Theology and Discipleship
-- N.D. Wilson

#Imagination #Shadow #Discipleship

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Narrative #Needs #Catechism

Horace smiled. "Always breakfast like a man condemned. One never knows that a day may bring."
-- N.D. Wilson

#Men #Breakfast #May

Cowards live for the sake of living, but for heroes, life is a weapon, a thing to be spent, a gift to be given to the weak and the lost and the weary, even to the foolish and the cowardly.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Hero #Coward #Weapons

Tragedy isn't an easy thing to kill. It takes more than a turtle. Tragedy must be destroyed by someone willing to be swallowed by it, willing to be broken, torn out of the flesh, but able to return to it. Someone must be able to shatter the tragic from within and exit into comedy, able to rip a hole so wide that a train of souls, a parade, could follow after, banging drums and throwing candy as they strolled into the sun.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Rip #Turtles #Broken

Descartes, the Frenchman, had little trouble knowing that he existed.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Knowing #Littles #Trouble

Henry York, aka Whimpering Child, aka WC (hair sample included), is hereby identified as Enemy, Hazard, and Human Mishap to all faeren in all districts, in all ways, and in all worlds.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Children #Aka #Hair

No place is ever the same tomorrow.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Tomorrow

If you knew the meaning of life, would you necessarily like it?
-- N.D. Wilson

#Meaning Of Life

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Giving #Creative #Lapses

May my living be grace to those behind me.
-- N.D. Wilson

#Grace #May #Behinds