Eric Ortlund > Quotes

“The landscape was endless, littered with broken clocks, torn pages with illegible writing, wedding rings, broken bits of pottery and jewelry. Occasionally something fell from the world above, like detritus sinking through the sea. In the distance, dark shapes moved which did not look human or like any animal I’d ever seen. From very far away, I thought I heard ocean waves. It was the loneliest place I had ever been, and every time I returned, that was how I thought of it: the Lonely.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“I fail to see how.” “Other species at least have the dignity to get on with copulating before they die without invoking fictions like truth and morality. You humans invest so much significance in ideas which aren’t even real! You strut and argue and kill each other over ideas your brain feeds you, all so that you can feel important, forgetting they are nothing more than the internal chattering of an over-evolved ape.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“That dissolving emptiness underneath everything you do—you actually think you can tame it to serve you? Men greater than you have tried and failed. Some try to welcome those dark powers inside our universe, and others sacrifice everything to stop them. Both sides fail. To bring it inside is to define it and thus lessen it. Yet it can never be banished, for everywhere it attends each one of you. It does not act or move, as you do. It does not even exist, as you think of existence. It cannot be described. And because of that, it has no limits and is so powerful, more powerful than anything inside reality. And you have a little of the beyond dwelling within, and all you can think of is to talk to other apes about your own little ideas, like cavemen pointing to a fire they made when the real sun waits outside.” I put my head down. It was all I could do not to weep. “My,”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“Listen, you have to find a way to keep going. Remember what’s beyond the world, but keep living in this one. That’s what I’m going to do from now on.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“consider: I am a universe, composed of millions of cells with mostly open space between; but things from outside can invade me (a disease, a bullet). It can even be a thought: an old man hears terrible news and has a heart attack. Is the actual universe any different?”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“indulge me for a moment by telling me what your body is composed of.” Rolling my eyes, I muttered, “I don’t want you to leave again, so I’ll play along. Bone and tissue.” “And those?” “Molecules.” “And those?” “Atoms,” I said. “Then sub-atomic particles, and then whatever holds those together.” “And beneath that? What is there?” “I’m no physicist.” “Physicists do not even know, because there is nothing to know. A variety of other sub-atomic relations will be discovered in years to come, but eventually all discovery must end, because physical reality ends. Look deeply enough, and there is simply nothing. Something less than empty space.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“I looked up at the flickering images of the real world, human lives playing themselves out in ghostly rapidity, people eating and sleeping and fighting and working. So many short lives were there, so many slipping through the threads of time and circumstance into the dark. How could I have failed to see how thin our world was?”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“you know what your home really was, Dr. Leventhal? A few timbers nailed together on a random spot on a random planet. Only your mind created it into something that felt like a home, a center, a resting place. You and your wife were actors in a drama you created for yourself, deliberately forgetting you had done so, a drama without a stage or audience, all so that you might not face the darkness outside.” “Why not live in the illusion? It’s what evolution has designed my species to do.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“an infinite weight which crushes, a light which blinds, a supernova which consumes, until you are reborn into something no human can look on and live, something which cannot live inside this universe without bursting it. You choose out of fear, and so your suffering will be greater. But your final end is the same as mine.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“The spectral light inside sang like slow thunder. Already it had grown into a worm that twisted, a bird that fluttered, a snake that slid through my intestines. As it moved, it was hard to tell where my viscera ended and the invader began. The being’s presence receded from my mind and the light disappeared. I stood in perfect darkness for a moment before the jail cell became visible again.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“Vicki scrambled toward me (Vicki, her name was Vicki) and touched my feet, her agony plain on her face. I saw her racing nervous system and knew she could not bear much more. The power inside me turned my head, and I saw a path off to one side in the gloom leading upwards. My arm pointed. That way leads you to your world. If you want to become real and truly beautiful, find me again. Almost before the words had stopped, Vicki was scampering and stumbling up the path. Malachi moved closer to me on tentacle-like legs, his burning eyes unblinking. He cracked the flail in his hand. Why did you make those promises to that vermin? What can you do? More than you, who depend on human sacrifice to straddle order and chaos.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“I shook my head and tried to speak as I looked into the terrified eyes I had looked into so many times before. Like a wave, the memory of all the lonely years we spent together hit me, like an entity neither of us could see but both could feel.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“Please. Even if my body’s dead, the thing inside won’t let me die. I don’t want to find out what that’s like.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“There is no ‘I’,” Malachi hissed. “Do you believe in the soul, Dr. Leventhal? An immortal spirit which will survive the death of the body?” “I’ve given up humanity’s early superstitions.” “Because you’re an intellectually honest man.” “Certainly.” “Then your experience of yourself is an accidental side-effect of your physical functioning. You humans so rarely think your ideas through to their logical conclusion! Can’t you see there is no core self, down there or back there somewhere, independent from the over-evolved ape that calls itself by your name? Your feeling that you have one is an after-effect of the chemicals in your brain. There is more of the void in you than you like to admit. Tell me I am wrong.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“I was wondering why my hand won’t work when it’s still attached to my wrist. And I can’t help but think about that tree over yonder, how the leaves die and fall and rot on the ground and then grow again every year, just to die. The roots sticking out of the ground like old bones. I’m trying to tell myself I like it and I’m glad it’s there. I’m not.” She was giving”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“Nothing is what surrounds existence on all sides, and—this is the crucial point—it permeates the solidity you call reality. You are, after all, mostly empty space. You are mostly void yourself.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway

“After all, the only kind of relationship with God that will save us is one where he is loved for who he is, for his own sake, irrespective of what secondary, earthly blessings we gain or lose because of our relationship with him. Unless Christians can, perhaps imperfectly but sincerely, affirm the all-surpassing worth of knowing God (Phil. 3:8)—surpassing even the worth of knowing one’s children—then we will be bored in the new creation, where God is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Our relationship with God must be greater than the secondary blessings he gives us, because it is a matter of time until we lose every secondary blessing when we die.”
― Eric Ortlund, Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God

“I stared at it for a while. Then something happened to me which hadn’t happened for a long time. Once as a boy my parents took me to the beach. I didn’t build sand castles or play in the waves. I just stared at the horizon the whole time. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. My father asked me what I was looking at, and I told him I wanted to get in a boat and sail out there and keep sailing. When I went to Greece with Sarah and we looked out over the crystal blue Mediterranean, the same sweetness pulled at me. I cannot tell you where it came from or what I wanted, but I never forgot it. And it was happening again, in that lonely, quiet place Malachi had brought me to, because … what was that, above the thin curtain of reality? Past the furthest horizon, unseen, outside, silent? I could not make it out, but from my great depth, I was sure there was something, the way stars become visible in daylight from the bottom of a well. It pulled at me.”
― Eric Ortlund, I Am the Doorway