Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl Quotes

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“Give me priests. Give me men with feathers in their hair, or tall domed hats, female oracles in caves, servants of the python, smoking weed and reading palms. A gypsy fortuneteller with a foot-peddle ouija board and a gold fish bowl for a crystal ball knows more about the world than many of the great thinkers of the West. Mumbling priests swinging stink 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, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“In The Silver Chair, the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum is all wisdom in rebutting the witch as she denies the existence of the world in which he believes. But as children's fiction isn't quite academically respectable, I'll pretend that I learned this from Blaise Pascal. [...] If the world really is accidental and devoid of meaning, and you and I have no more value in the cosmos than you average bread mold, and Beauty and Goodness are artificial constructs imagined within an explosion, constructs that are controlled by chemical reactions within the accident and have no necessary correspondence to reality, then my made-up children's world licks your real world silly. Depart from me. Go drown in your seething accident. Puddleglum and I are staying here.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“What is this world? What is it for? It is art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the Infinite.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Spring is worth the wait. Life is worth the death.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“If someone else was delivering your lines, would you like them? If someone else was wearing your attitude, would you be impressed?”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“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

“This is poetry, but it is not delicate and fragile, a placid ocean beneath a Bible vese on an inspirational poster. This poetry had testicles. It's rougher than a rodeo. Which is why the cliffs are crowded with spectators”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Gilbert Keith Chesterton (that fabulously large Catholic writer) overheard someone making fun of Milton (it didn't matter that the insults were all true).”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“But God never seems capable of moderation”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. Skip the bowls of fruit and statues. Let the page flick your thumbs. This is His spoken word.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

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

“He exists on two planes. He sees the story as He tells it, while He weaves it, shapes it, and sings it. And He stepped inside it. The shadows exist in the painting, the dark corners of grief and trial and wickedness all exist so that He might step inside them, so we could see how low He can stoop. In this story, the Author became flesh and wandered the stage with Hamlet, offering His own life. In this story, the Author heaped all that He loathed, all that displeased Him, all the wrongness of the world, onto Himself.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Evil is an adjective. It is an adjective used to describe those actions of man (and their effects) that are contrary to the nature of God.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“This world is beautiful but badly broken. St. Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning. I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and the comedies of history. I love it with all of its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers. I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children encountering their first butterfly. I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story. And like every good story, there will be an ending. I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be. I love it because it spins and tilts, because it’s dizzying, because of the night sky and the swirling lights. But I have run too far ahead. We should be more . . . philosophical.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

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

“If there are meta-beings, a god or gods who did not create the world, then they can tell us what to do the same way bullies can, though they have no jurisdiction. They can run our countries like Italian neighborhoods and along the same principles. Do it or get whacked. Bend your knees, slaughter bulls, lick dirt, give us your milk money. But might, even above the human level, does not make right.

But a creative God, a God without whom none of this would be, a God who spoke reality into being and shapes it even now, He has authority. The world is His. You are His the way my words are mine. We are dust spoken from nothing, shaped with the moisture of His breath, named and now-living.”
― N. D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Christ to the thief: Come with me. We die together, a thief and the Maker of the world. Walk with the Infinite made flesh into the belly of the whale. Stand close while reality quakes. Watch while Death is taken by the throat. Today you will be with me in Paradise.
Stories don't end at death.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn't stuck in one place.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“I've seen a baby born. And, ahem, I know what made it. But I'm not telling, you'd never believe me.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

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

“I knew I was different from the rest of you plebes. Look how silly and gothic you all look with your skinny, knobbed arms. I'm unique. Neoclassical.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“To exist in this poem [of creation] is a greater gift than any finite creature can imagine. To be so insignificant and yet still be given a speaking part, to be given scenes that are my own, and my own only, scenes where the audience is limited to the Author Himself (scenes that I often flub), to have been here with my frozen nose, to have been crafted with at least as much care as a snowflake (though I'm harder to melt), and to hear and feel and see and taste and smell the heavy poetry of God, that is enough.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“If someone else was wearing your attitude, would you be impressed?”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Is the journey the destination? Please, no. Let me out of your Volkswagen bus at the next corner.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World