Andrew Klavan > Quotes

“You know what it's like," said Storm, "when you want to--just--pour a woman into a glass and--just-drink her--just drink her down, one gulp, body and soul?”
― Andrew Klavan, Uncanny

“If you're not at least willing to die for something- something that really matters- in the end, you die for nothing.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth of the Matter

“It can be crazy hard. To keep your faith, to keep going. It can be harder than I ever would have imagined. Sometimes things happen to you, really bad things that aren't fair, things that make you feel so terrible you're not even sure who you are anymore or whether you're right or wrong, good or bad. Sometimes you feel like there's no one to turn to, and you're all alone and so scared you can hardly move and so tired you just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep forever. I guess that's kind of the way Alex felt that last night I saw him. And that's the way I felt now. But I guess I had one advantage over Alex. I guess in some way I'd been training for this time my whole life. I'd been training every day, even in simple things, little things. I trained to keep my mind sharp when I went to school. I trained in karate to keep my body and spirit strong. Even when I just went to church, or when I prayed by myself, it was a kind of training: I was training to remember that I was not alone. I was never alone.”
― Andrew Klavan

“A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth of the Matter

“Do right. Fear Nothing.”
― Andrew Klavan, Crazy Dangerous

“The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“This isn't just 'the way things are.' This is the way you made them. This is the result of your choices, your actions. Yours.”
― Andrew Klavan, Empire of Lies

“Theoretically, let's stipulate, for argument's sake, that there are a lot of powerful people at a university like this who believe things that aren't, strictly speaking, true."

Leftists, you mean."

Let's just call them people. Powerful people."

All right."

These powerful people believe things like: One culture is as good as another. Or, there's no such thing as good and evil. Therefore, if America is at odds or at war with someone, it must be America's fault. You only have to think about those statements for two minutes to see that they can't possibly be true. But these people think they should be true and they think they'll seem to be true if no one is allowed to say they're not true. So they attack anyone who says that they're not true. They call him names. Racist, sexist, phobic, offensive, whatever. They demand apologies from him. They make his life a misery, so no one wants to speak up."

So it's like the emperor's new clothes."

Right. Except instead of clothes, it's all the emperor's lies. And in an Empire of Lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth.”
― Andrew Klavan

“It's too bad you can't always live as if it were the last moment of your life. Because, you know, it might be-it might really be. And if we could really see it that way, really live like that, I think we'd all feel a lot differently about everything.”
― Andrew Klavan, If We Survive

“Have you ever had to get through a day, smiling at people, talking, as if everything were normal and okay, while all the time you felt like you were carrying a leaden weight of unhappiness inside you?”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth of the Matter

“Good things might happen in your life or bad things might happen, sometimes terrible things, but no matter what happens, your soul is your own. And no one and nothing can stop you.”
― Andrew Klavan, If We Survive

“the ultimate irrational prejudice of the human mind: the belief that the symbols of reality are more real than the reality they symbolize. That’s us all over. We believe that money is more valuable than the work it represents, that sex is more essential than the love it expresses, that an actor is more admirable than the hero he portrays, that flesh is more alive than spirit. That’s the whole nature of our deluded lives, the cause of so much of our misery. One by one, we let idolatry ruin each good thing. Without faith, we can’t help ourselves. Without faith, we can no more see through our materialist prejudice than we can see through the big blue bowl of the sky and into the eternity beyond. The choice between idolatry and faith—which is ultimately the choice between slavery in the flesh and freedom in the spirit—is the only real choice we have to make. I”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“If, after all, there is no truth, how could it be true that there is no truth? If there is no absolute morality, how can you condemn the morality of considering my culture better than another? Relativism made no sense, as Shakespeare clearly saw.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“Our moral decisions about ourselves can be spiritual. Our moral decisions about other people can only be practical.”
― Andrew Klavan

“No one starts out with the answers. You figure them out as you go and you learn from the people who figured them out before you.”
― Andrew Klavan

“Most people have to die to get to Hell. I took a shortcut.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Final Hour

“You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life.

And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.

I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.

Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.”
― Andrew Klavan, Empire of Lies

“Funny how people don't really see each other. Men and women. They invent each other in their minds and then they see what they invent.They don't really see each other. Now she was in love with him and she didn't even know his real name, didn't know anything real about him.”
― Andrew Klavan, Dynamite Road

“it sometimes seems to me the entire postmodern assault on the concept of truth has been staged to avoid just this conclusion: some cultures are simply more productive than others”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“There are things you can describe in life and things you just can’t. There are dangers and adventures, miseries and fear that you can tell about… well, then there’s hope and joy and love – and those are beyond the power of words to describe.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Homelanders

“Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it’s like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors. We can only say: it’s like this—this story, this picture, this song.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“Does God know I'm still here? Does God know it's still me inside?"
"Sure He does! Of course He does! He's right with you. he's right there."
"Because I feel really alone sometimes."
"You're not alone." I move to her, put my hand on her shoulder. "You're not, believe me.”
― Andrew Klavan, Crazy Dangerous

“Joy. The joy of my joy. There through everything. A shocking sense of vitality and beauty present in both happiness and in the midst of pain. The only thing I can think to compare this experience to is the experience of an excellent story—reading a great novel, say, or watching a great movie. The scene before you might be a happy one or a sad one. You might feel uplifted or you might feel heartbroken or you might feel afraid. But whatever you feel, you’re still loving the story. Through prayer, I came to experience both pleasure and sorrow in something like that way. In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what. During”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“Life's funny chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something-something that really matters-in the end you die for nothing.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth of the Matter

“The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection. Emotional wounds heal in other people’s hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people’s minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul’s shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags. When you’re working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“For me to accept baptism, I had to believe in Christ’s reality—in the reality not just of his life but also of his miracles and death and resurrection. But how could I? Such things don’t happen. Look around you. There are no miracles. There can be no resurrection. The clockwork world is all in all. But such things don’t happen, I knew now, was the ultimate irrational prejudice of the human mind: the belief that the symbols of reality are more real than the reality they symbolize. That’s us all over. We believe that money is more valuable than the work it represents, that sex is more essential than the love it expresses, that an actor is more admirable than the hero he portrays, that flesh is more alive than spirit. That’s the whole nature of our deluded lives, the cause of so much of our misery.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil—though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God. So we have to choose. Either there is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God is real. Either”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“There's a school of thought today that rejects patriotism. People are made nervous by that intense allegiance to a country. They think it can only lead to war and bloodshed and that fights can be avoided if we all just compromise and get along. And, of course, compromise and getting along are great things as long as you're not sacrificing essential values. But I believe there's a line in the sand, some things that you have to be willing to stand up for, even if it means trouble. Charlie's patriotism is not blind, flag-waving jingoism: it's an intense allegiance to the American concept of liberty. He's through and through. He can talk about it and explain it. And he's shown he's willing to give everything for it. I admire him for that.”
― Andrew Klavan