Andrew Klavan Quotes

Alex got angry at me because he said I didn't understand how hard it was. And you know what? He was right. I didn't understand. Not then. ~ Andrew Klavan

If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don't believe, no evidence can be enough. All ~ Andrew Klavan

The fact was, as a story - even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean - the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning. I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we're in. The ~ Andrew Klavan

Even the lowest form of humor - maybe especially the lowest, the most basic form - suggests that we were intended to be something higher than ourselves. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

Even the kingdom of evil came to seem to me like only the empty space where true love might have been. ~ Andrew Klavan

what had appeared accidental to me in the past, now often seemed to bear the imprint of supernatural intent. Once you see it you can't unsee it: the supernatural is not supernatural; the ordinary world is suffused with the miraculous. Here ~ 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

Our moral decisions about ourselves can be spiritual. Our moral decisions about other people can only be practical. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

The trouble with straw men is it only takes a single match to set them ablaze. ~ Andrew Klavan

Morality is not a one not song. It's a harmony of obligations to man and God. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

It reminded me of the sense I'd had then that our mortal lives were just incarnate metaphors, that we are stories being told about the living love that created us and sustains us. It made me wonder if maybe that was true of all history. Maybe all of history's beauty and bloodshed was a story not about pleasure and pain and power but about humanity's relationship with an unseen spirit of love. We yearned for that spirit but we feared and hated it, too, because when it shone its terrible light on us, we saw ourselves as we were, broken and shameful, far from what the spirit of love had made us. ~ Andrew Klavan

I'm a professional journalist. Making up lies to fit the facts - it's what we do. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

If you're not at least willing to die for something- something that really matters- in the end, you die for nothing. ~ Andrew Klavan

If there's one thing every good novelist understands, it's that our inner world is unreliable and yet there's no getting beyond it. Every sense is subject to deception, including the moral sense. What seems at first like the hard surface of spiritual reality is really fathomless when you dive down into it. There is no bottom. We neve know anything for sure. (p. xvi) ~ Andrew Klavan

North," said the face beneath the sheet. "I belong to the National Association of Broadcasting Employees and Technicians. If you wake me up before I've slept twelve hours, I get paid short turnaround."
"But Rose
"
"If you wake me up before seven hours, I get to push a screwdriver into your lungs."
- from "The Scarred Man ~ Andrew Klavan

You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world. ~ Andrew Klavan

For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual's delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn't so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? ... Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You're doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You're doing great, intellectuals! You're doing great. Much ~ Andrew Klavan

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

Don't worry about anything. Pray about everything ... Put your hands together and point your soul toward the light of God. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

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

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 world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues. ~ Andrew Klavan

(Y)ou should never let yourself get swept away by the crowd. Sometimes everyone you know can be saying something or believing something and it can just be dead wrong. All around you there might be people getting all excited or panicked and yelling for you to do the wrong thing or believe the wrong thing. They can make it very hard for you to refuse them or even just disagree with them out loud. People get angry at you when you disagree with them - especially when they're wrong - and nobody likes to be unpopular or have people angry at them. Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to use your reason and your heart and stand up for what's true ~ Andrew Klavan

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

Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real. Why, ~ Andrew Klavan

Most people have to die to get to Hell. I took a shortcut. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

It's always the voice of God they try to silence first. ~ Andrew Klavan

Do right. Fear Nothing. ~ Andrew Klavan

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 Ruling Class by Peter Barnes. ~ Andrew Klavan

You cannot know yourself alone, any more than you can see your own face without a mirror. ~ Andrew Klavan

The Old Testament traces one complete cycle of that history, one people's rise and fall. This particular people is unique only in that they're the ones who begin to remember what man was made for. Moses' revelation at the burning bush is as profound as any religious scene in literature. There, he sees that the eternal creation and destruction of nature is not a mere process but the mask of a personal spirit, I AM THAT I AM. The centuries that follow that revelation are a spiraling semicircle of sin and shame and redemption, of freedom recovered and then surrendered in return for imperial greatness, of a striving toward righteousness through law that reveals only the impossibility of righteousness, of power and pride and fall. It's every people's history, in other words, but seen anew in the light of the fire of I AM. It ~ Andrew Klavan

Just dismissing them gave me a kind of power over them. That was the whole method of the con, even when I was conning myself. These ~ Andrew Klavan

Maybe real-life Mom didn't vacuum the house flawlessly arrayed in pearls and a pleated shirt like the mother on leave it to beaver. Maybe she flirted with the milkman or waited for the kids to go to bed so she could hammer back a couple of mugs of vodka pretending it was tea. But she was there to greet us when we came home from school in the afternoon. She made us dinner, kept watch on us through the kitchen window, put Band-Aids on our scrapes and bruises.
She was Mom and that was no small thing. ~ Andrew Klavan

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

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But ~ 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

For instance, I love the movie Casablanca. Who doesn't? No matter how many egghead critics declare Citizen Kane to be the greatest American movie, we all know it's Casablanca in fact. ~ Andrew Klavan

And the air
I don't know how to describe it exactly
it had that strange cool spring feeling in it, that feeling as if you remember something wonderful but you're not quite sure what it is. ~ Andrew Klavan

Every evil weaves itself into the fabric of history, never to be undone. Yet at the same time - at the very same time - each of us gets a new soul with which to start the world again. It ~ Andrew Klavan

In dreams begin responsibilities," as the poet Yeats said, ~ Andrew Klavan

I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist - or the Buddhist - might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw. So ~ Andrew Klavan

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

JOHN: you hacked my dad's wallet?? ~ Andrew Hussie

It is not the rich man's son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race for life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the dark horse in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office. ~ Andrew Carnegie

The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf - is of St. Andrew himself bearing the slatier cross on which, once he was captured at Patras, he was to be stretched before he was crucified.Only the Scots would have thought of celebrating a national game with the figure of a tortured saint. ~ Alistair Cooke

Everywhere Janner looked, there were ropes, poles, platforms, and a thousand other ways to break an arm or a leg. It was beautiful. ~ Andrew Peterson

Less is technically Christian. There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be. ~ Andrew Solomon

I'd like to keep our kids in their schools. I'd like to keep our young men and women in jobs. ~ Andrew Forrest

There is something inside all boys that drives us to go away again and again and again. ~ Andrew Smith

The great background question about the Labour governments of the sixties is whether with a stronger leader they could have gripped the country's big problems and dealt with them. How did it happen that a cabinet of such brilliant, such clever and self-confident people achieved so little? In part, it was the effect of the whirling court politics demonstrated by 'In Place of Strife'. ~ Andrew Marr

Be near me when my light is low and be near me when my heart is sick... ~ Andrew O'Hagan

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote. ~ Jane Campion

I'm not much given to making shamanistic remarks about all this, but I'm a great believer in the dream life. If I can carry without spilling whatever it is that drips into my head in the night to my desk, then that's valuable. ~ Andrew Motion

Americans are not a perfect people, but we are called to a perfect mission. ~ Andrew Jackson

Facing Riko like this went against everything his mother taught him. He'd been raised to run, to sacrifice everything and everyone to ensure his own survival. His mother had never given him ground to stand on. Maybe that was why he hadn't been strong enough to save her in the end. A jumble of lies had nothing to fight for. But Neil Josten was a Fox. Andrew called this home; Nicky called him family. Neil wasn't going to lose any of it. If two weeks with Riko was the price to keep his team safe, Neil would pay it. Somehow ~ Nora Sakavic

I was absolutely astonished by an onslaught of comments expressing their absolute shock that IFLS is run by a woman. ~ Elise Andrew

Just that dwelling and planning is bullshit, you dwell on the past, you can't move forward. Spend too much time planning for the future and you just push yourself backwards, or you stay stagnant in the same place all your life. Live in the moment, where everything is just right, take your time and limit your bad memories and you'll get wherever it is you're going a lot faster and with less bumps in the road along the way. ~ J.A. Redmerski

I used to have this Mercedes, a dark blue 450SLC, which was the most beautiful car. I'd like to have another unusual, beautiful car. ~ Andrew Davies

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me. ~ Andrew Greeley

You can customize tomorrow, only if you train your brain today! Don't believe in Luck, only believe in hard work ~ Andrew Rozario

What I love about the Internet and what I try to do on the issues is insist upon the ability to have bad taste if one wants. ~ Andrew Sullivan

As truly as God by His power once
created, so truly by that same power must God every moment maintain. ~ Andrew Murray

All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary. ~ Andrew Jackson

Love is not a feeling in your chest; it is bending down to wash another's feet. ~ Andrew Peterson

I'm like a magpie. I use lots of different things to build a character. ~ Andrew Lincoln

I've read a lot of Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting, Glue - he's written some beauties. ~ Andrew Flintoff

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin

It's very nice to be able to be who you are. ~ Andrew Tobias

You should be able to choose which hospital you go to. ~ Andrew Lansley

Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble. ~ Andrew Murray

It does seem to me, though, that there is a difference between the Mormon Church saying, "We don't accept gay people within the Church; we don't accept gay marriage within the Church; we don't accept people who act on their homosexual desires within the Church;" and trying to interfere with what happens outside of the Church. That seemed to me to be an abomination. ~ Andrew Solomon

When I wrote a long story about the retreat of sea ice, I made clear it could go the other way for a while, and that doesn't mean we don't know that a warmer world will have less sea ice. It just means there's a lot of variability and people can pay too much attention to the big swings in one direction or the other. ~ Andrew Revkin

I do not support vengeance. I support justice. They are not one in the same. ~ Mark Andrew Poe

Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense. ~ Andrew Coyle Bradley

Bitcoin, in the short or even long term, may turn out be a good investment in the same way that anything that is rare can be considered valuable. Like baseball cards. Or a Picasso. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin

I had this idea when I was in the hospital, .. It seems like every year I always have different people come and ask for a Christmas song and it seemed strangely appropriate for me this year because Christmas is the time that I am supposed to be sort of back and up and running and whatnot. So I just wrote a song about returning from this very interesting journey and kind of getting back to normal and getting back to work and my regular life. ~ Andrew McMahon

I think leadership is most effective when it's your own personality. But I feel like it's a natural progression as a quarterback, as well. ~ Andrew Luck

He very word "patient" implies passivity and powerlessness. Me-teacher-you-dumbbell, or me-doctor-you-patient, or me-politician-you-voter, or any other paternalistic or maternalistic stay-in-your-place tradition will not pass muster with me. ~ Andrew Saul

No American should be forced to choose between their spouse and their country. ~ Andrew Sullivan

It's a fundamental principle of management: what gets measured gets done. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson And Andrew McAfee

Madness in Civilization is a brilliant, provocative, and hugely entertaining history of the treatment and mistreatment of the mentally ill. Packed with bizarre details and disturbing facts, Andrew Scull's book offers fresh and compelling insights on the way medicine's inability to solve the mystery of madness has both haunted and shaped two thousand years of culture. Required reading for anyone who has ever gone to a shrink! ~ Dirk Wittenborn

The end of summer is slower. This time of year is precious to everyone. It belongs to the soft cotton pat of your heart that never ages past ten years old. You can smell it - fresh pencil shavings and cinnamon. ~ Mari Andrew

I am as a speck of dust in the sun, and not even so much, in this solemn, mysterious, unknowable universe. ~ Andrew Carnegie