What a GREAT book. I'm already looking forward to reading it again, which hopefully I will do over the summer. I love the way this guy thinks and writes. It's hard to describe or summarize this book, so I'll just copy down some of my favorite quotes.
"Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away."
"The 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."
"Einstein gave us space-time and a whole lot of bad sci-fi along with it."
"It's cold tonight, and my mind is too small to grasp the world, tired from trying."
"The apostle Paul: God made your eyes, can he not make them pink?"
"To exist in this poem 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."
"We imitate God's words, but our noises are insufficient. So we doodle in the margins, children working to capture the Sistine Chapel with finger paints on a paper plate. What else can we do?"
"My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the Spring. His guitar is more helpful."
"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." G. K. Chesterton.
"When the final collapse comes, when the ice triumphs, she at least will have no truck with grief. Let the winter come. It is the only path to spring."
"People are raped in this world, and rape is evil. Because evil exists, there must be no God. Because there is no God, no authoritative standard over creation, the badness of rape downgrades to a mere matter of societal taste. Ethnic cuisine, ethnic ethics. In God's absence rape is no longer fundamentally evil. In our country, you'll get confined to a cell (if caught and convicted), but that just means we enforce our taste, not that our taste has any real authority over anyone else. In other societies, girls have been passed around and traded like baseball cards. Is that right?"
"An atheist can tell us that he is a good person, that he has never stolen a lawn mower or murdered his wife. I believe him. What he cannot tell me is what is fundamentally wrong about lawn mower theft and wife killing. he will try, but he can't."
"Perhaps you feel a more serious burden. Looking out of your eyes, the world could easily be improved. Fewer people could die. Death could be banished. Hunger slaked. Thirst quenched. Evil, that which displeases God, should be gone. So it should. But how? When? What is it that you are assessing? Would Pride and Prejudice be improved by throwing away every page prior to the resolution, by erasing every character flaw, every misunderstanding and dispute?"
"It is easy to be numb to the world's marvels when you've missed lunch and the light is still red."
"Bruises heal, but stories are forever."
"In a world with evil, god is either not all powerful or He is not all good. Are these the only options? Or He is Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Botticelli, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh (with both ears), Michelangelo, Vivaldi, Robert Johnson, N.C. Wyeth, and Gary Larson rolled into one."
"Do you dislike your role in the story, your place in the shadow? What complaints do we have that the hobbits could not have heaved at Tolkien?"
"Act, and act well until you reach your final scene."
"Christianity is no longer about changing the world. Christianity is no longer about facing the darkness and walking into shadow with souls full of light. We don't see evil as a thing to be conquered, we don't see life as a story with any kind of arc. We don't want our God to be the God of falcons and mole rats and skunk justice."
"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 Shekinah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag."
"The Problem Part Two: 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 pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and they've grown, they will pollute the shadows."
"Stories don't end at death."
Can't wait to read it again. One of the few books that I think everyone should read.
