Denali Christianson ~Semi-active~ > Denali's Quotes

“Love is not a feeling in your chest; it is bending down to wash another's feet.”
― Andrew Peterson

“The gospel gives me hope, and hope is not a language the dark voices understand.”
― Andrew Peterson

“The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it far more easily than he can kill other people.”
― George Dennison Prentice

“I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. We aren’t writers, but gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know. When we manage to make something pretty, it’s only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. That means there’s no end to the discovery. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work is done. Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars.

On and on it goes, all the way to the lightless borderlands of time and space, which we come to discover in some future age are but the beginnings or endings of a single word spoken from the mouth of God. Some nights, while I traipse down the hill, I imagine that word isn’t a word at all, but a burst of laughter.”
― Andrew Peterson

“The problem with wearing a dress is that it clashes with a sword.”
― Chuck Black, Kingdom's Hope

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
― Jim Elliot

“It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“A Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“There can be as many wrong reasons to do the right thing as there are stars in the sky. There might even be more than one legitimate right reason. But there is never a right reason to do the wrong thing. Not ever.”
― Donita K. Paul, DragonKnight

“Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.”
― Michael Crichton

“There are a great many things that shouldn't be. Being angry won't change it or make it easier.”
― Selina R. Gonzalez, A Thieving Curse

“Dragons can only eat you, but people can laugh at you, and that is like being chewed to death by a smile.”
― Jennifer Trafton, Henry and the Chalk Dragon

“He fainted. Then he came to and remembered what happened and fainted again.”
― Donita K. Paul, DragonSpell

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Respect your dream.”
― Jill Williamson, Go Teen Writers: How to Turn Your First Draft into a Published Book

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Don’t let them eat all those cookies, Coralie. I’m relying on you.” “I will not betray your trust,” she said with the utmost seriousness. I nodded. Cookies were serious business.”
― Melanie Cellier, Voice of Dominion

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.”
― a.a. milne, The World of Winnie-the-Pooh

“Wear pink!' her mother had said. 'It confuses the enemy.”
― Donita K. Paul

“Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“But all of us, in some way, reflect an image of God-of who He is. So who's to say what's right or what's wrong about how we look?
-Twila”
― Ginny L. Yttrup, Invisible

“I know the Infinite's voice because He tells me everything I don't want to hear, sends me where I don't want to go, and asks me to fulfill tasks I consider impossible. Above all, He is forever right.”
― R.J. Larson, Prophet

“Dad. Jacen. Coruscant. Answers."
"I don't like it that you can win an argument without using verbs.”
― Aaron Allston, Fate of the Jedi: Outcast

“Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.”
― Max Lucado, He Still Moves Stones: Everyone Needs a Miracle

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”
― Max Lucado

“God . . . will You write my love story? Will You write my life story? I just don’t believe I can do it on my own. My heart will shatter into a million pieces long before I get it right.”
― Shantelle Mary Hannu, A Dream Not Imagined

“Sometimes I have good ideas, sometimes I have bad ideas and sometimes I have colossally bad ideas.”
― Melanie Cellier, The Princess Companion: A Retelling of The Princess and the Pea

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico