N.D. Wilson

I listened to you tell me, tell everyone, and all the world, __raise the Lord._ You were broken, but not by bullets and bombs. You were broken by grace.

Solomon smiles with us

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.

Affectation is really a question of heart motive. Growing into a persona is an essential part of maturing. Anything you might choose to do is going to contribute to one persona or another. People will only call attention to it if it is markedly different from the course you were apparently on before.

Henry successfully kept his mind on the game, which might seem strange for a boy who slept beside a wall of magic. But baseball was as magical to him as a green, mossy mountain covered in ancient trees. What's more, baseball was a magic he could run around in and laugh about. While the magic of the cupboards was not necessarily good, the smell of leather mixed with dusty sweat and spitting and running through sparse grass after a small ball couldn't be anything else.

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment__arrative catechisms.

Tom shut his eyes again, because when his eyes were shut, he could tell himself that there was light.

A man's words reveal, first, the man. The words are not the man, and yet they reveal him faithfully and are to be identified with him. Out of the abundance of the heart, the man speaks. The foundational nature of all language is therefore metaphorical because every word a man speaks reveals himself__ust as God reveals Himself through the Word. Every word spoken ultimately reveals the speaker.

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.

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.

What is the world? What is it for? It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched. Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe.

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.

Frank, I ran into Gladys and Billy at the store yesterday. Do you know what he said to me?"The girls went very quiet. Frank didn't look up."Hello?" he asked, and kept rubbing Henry's knife.Dotty hit him with her rag. "He said that. And so did she. But the important part was when he said, 'Frank ever get that door open?' Do you know what I said? What I said was--Are you ready for this? I said, 'No,'""Ah" Frank said. He lifted Henry's knife up to his mouth and dabbed the blade with his tongue. "That's my honest wife. I appreciate you lookin' out for my dignity.

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.

May you fear no evil. ...And may evil fear you.

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.

But if that was going to happen, it was going to happen whether or not he worried about it.

Slowly, Rupert Greeves raised his head. His eyelids fluttered and the corner of his mouth twitched up. 'What,' he asked the world, 'can you do to erase my laughter?