Abigail > Abigail's Quotes

“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. With an average life expectancy of 78.2 years in the US (subtracting eight hours a day for sleep), I have around 250,00 conscious hours remaining to me in which I could be smiling or scowling, rejoicing in my life, in this race, in this story, or moaning and complaining about my troubles. I can be giving my fingers, my back, my mind, my words, my breaths, to my wife and my children and my neighbors, or I can grasp after the vapor and the vanity for myself, dragging my feet, afraid to die and therefore afraid to live. And, like Adam, I will still die in the end.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“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, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“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

“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, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“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, Dandelion Fire

“The moon was up, painting the world silver, making things look just a little more alive.”
― N.D. Wilson, Leepike Ridge

“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, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“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, Leepike Ridge

“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, Empire of Bones

“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, Leepike Ridge

“When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“To love is to be selfless. To be selfless is to be fearless. To be fearless is to strip 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 noble men and women. Give all that can be given. Give even your live itself.”
― N.D. Wilson, Empire of Bones

“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, Leepike Ridge

“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, Leepike Ridge

“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, The Dragon's Tooth

“Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth.

The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death.

The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade.

The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it.”
― N.D. Wilson, The Chestnut King

“Assumption Two: God only cares about spiritual things. To be honest, I don't even know what this means, but those elusive spiritual things have been helping Christians cop out of true holiness for centuries.

We are all like accountants with wizard-like abilities, funneling our choices and goals and actions through shell corporations and off-shore banks of unrighteousness. God only cares about spiritual things? His kingdom is a spiritual kingdom? Are you kidding me? God only cares how we emote at him?

That's part of it, sure, but I was pretty sure that He made physical animals and a physical man and gave him a physical job. I was pretty sure that He made a physical tree with physical fruit and told that physical man not to eat it or he would physically die. He physically ate it anyway and now we physically go into the physical ground, physically rot, and become physical plant and physical worm food.

And because of this incredibly physical problem, He made things even more clear when His own Son took on physical flesh to lead a physical life that lead to a physical cross where He physically absorbed our curse, was physically tortured, and bought you and bought me and bought this whole physical world with His physical blood. If He'd wanted a spiritual kingdom, He could have saved Himself a huge amount of trouble (to say nothing of making the Greek philosophers and medieval gnostics a lot happier), by just skipping Christmas and the Crucifixion.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“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, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“God's big enough that small doesn't matter.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“I am here to paint you a picture of the world I see”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus, he was real nice."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“Keep reading. It's one of the most marvelous adventures that anyone can have.”
― Lloyd Alexander

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

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

“It is quite a risk to spank a wizard for getting hysterical about his hair.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“I hope your bacon burns.”
― Diana Wynne Jones , Howl’s Moving Castle

“Really, these wizards! You'd think no one had ever had a cold before! Well, what is it?" she asked, hobbling through the bedroom door onto the filthy carpet.
"I'm dying of boredom," Howl said pathetically. "Or maybe just dying.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet