Donna > Donna's Quotes

“Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we're big," Noah tells him.
"What did you write?"
"I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first."
"That's a very good answer."
"Isn't it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it's just children and old people who laugh."
"Did you write that?"
"Yes."
"What did your teacher say?"
"She said I hadn't understood the task."
"And what did you say?"
"I said she hadn't understood my answer.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded--under torch and hammer and chisel--into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“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.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Clear your throat and open your eyes. You are on stage. The lights are on. It’s only natural if you’re sweating, because this isn’t make-believe. This is theater for keeps. Yes, it is a massive stage, and there are millions of others on stage with you. Yes, you can try to shake the fright by blending in. But it won’t work. You have the Creator God’s full attention, as much attention as He ever gave Napoleon. Or Churchill. Or even Moses. Or billions of others who lived and died unknown. Or a grain of sand. Or one spike on one snowflake. You are spoken. You are seen. It is your turn to participate in creation. Like a kindergartener shoved out from behind the curtain during his first play, you might not know which scene you are in or what comes next, but God is far less patronizing than we are. You are His art, and He has no trouble stooping. You can even ask Him for your lines.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Assumption Two: God only cares about spiritual things. To be honest, I don't even know what this means, but those elusive spiritual things have been helping Christians cop out of true holiness for centuries.

We are all like accountants with wizard-like abilities, funneling our choices and goals and actions through shell corporations and off-shore banks of unrighteousness. God only cares about spiritual things? His kingdom is a spiritual kingdom? Are you kidding me? God only cares how we emote at him?

That's part of it, sure, but I was pretty sure that He made physical animals and a physical man and gave him a physical job. I was pretty sure that He made a physical tree with physical fruit and told that physical man not to eat it or he would physically die. He physically ate it anyway and now we physically go into the physical ground, physically rot, and become physical plant and physical worm food.

And because of this incredibly physical problem, He made things even more clear when His own Son took on physical flesh to lead a physical life that lead to a physical cross where He physically absorbed our curse, was physically tortured, and bought you and bought me and bought this whole physical world with His physical blood. If He'd wanted a spiritual kingdom, He could have saved Himself a huge amount of trouble (to say nothing of making the Greek philosophers and medieval gnostics a lot happier), by just skipping Christmas and the Crucifixion.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“...live hard and die grateful.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child's smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Atheism is an idea. Most often (thank God), it is an idea lived and told with blunt jumbo-crayon clumsiness. Some child of Christianity or Judaism dons an unbelieving Zorro costume and preens about the living room.

Behold, a dangerous thinker of thinks! A believer in free-from-any-and-all-goodness! Fear my brainy blade!

Put candy in their bucket. Act scared. Don't tell them that they're adorable. Atheism is not an idea we want fleshed out.

Atheism incarnate does happen in this reality narrative. But it doesn't rant about Islam's treatment of women as did the (often courageous) atheist Christopher Hitchens. It doesn't thunder words like evil and mean it (as Hitch so often did) when talking about oppressive communist regimes. His costume slipped all the time—and in many of his best moments.

Atheism incarnate is nihilism from follicle to toenail. It is morality merely as evolved herd survival instinct (non-bindng, of course, and as easy for us to outgrow as our feathers were). When Hitchens thundered, he stood in the boots of forefathers who knew that all thunder comes from on high.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Rule 1 for Mortals: Love the Lord your God (with every bit of you).
Rule 2 for Mortals: Love your neighbor as yourself.
Tip 1 for Mortals: Ask God to call your bluffs.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“The fall of man did not introduce evil; it placed us on the wrong side of it, under its rule, needing rescue.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars.”
― Thomas Nelson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“By His grace, we are the water made wine. We are the dust made flesh made dust made flesh again. We are the whores made brides and the thieves made saints and the killers made apostles. We are the dead made living.

We are His cross.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“God's big enough that small doesn't matter.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“May my living be grace to those behind me.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“If God gives you (or makes you) a joke, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Laugh.)
If God gives you an obstacle, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Climb it. Then laugh.)
If God gives you more profound hardship, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Climb it. Then laugh. Exhibit A: His Son.)”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Living is the same thing as dying. Living well is the same thing as dying for others.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“He was pierced and scourged and mocked. He was cursed and raised up on a tree, but He was in that ancient pose of victory.
An old man on a hill, a blind man between two pillars, the God Man on a cross.
Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.
Almost.
It is death by living.
The earth shook. The roof came down. The world changed. The armies fled.
That Moses kept his hands up.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“I listened to you tell me, tell everyone, and all the world, “Praise the Lord.” You were broken, but not by bullets and bombs. You were broken by grace.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Do your best. Live. Create. Fail.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Infinite goes all the way up and all the way down; and at every level, with equal attention, He creates with the full dose of His personality.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how?”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“Every rock is spoon by the Word. Every time I touch a stone, I am touching the Voice of God. Every cell of me is crafted by that artistry. My life is His breath. But we mortals grow numb. We want to feel more. And so we add MSG to our earthly brands of holiness.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“My wife and I tend to overgift to our kids at Christmas. We laugh and feel foolish when a kid is so distracted with one toy that we must force them into opening the next, or when something grand goes completely unnoticed in a corner. How consumerist, right? How crassly American. How like God. We are all that overwhelmed kid, not even noticing our heartbeats, not even noticing our breathing, not even noticing that our fingertips can feel and pick things up, that pie smells like pie and that our hangnails heal and that honey-crisp apples are real and that dogs wag their tails and that awe perpetually awaits us in the sky. The real yearning, the solomonic state of mind, is caused by too much gift, by too many things to love in too short a time. Because the more we are given, the more we feel the loss as we are all made poor and sent back to our dust.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“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.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent

“We are characters—spoken and shaped down to the rhythms of the electrons in our toe fungus. But we are also active. We have been shaped in the Shaper’s image.”
― N.D. Wilson, Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent