Quotes from Andrew Klavan

The hungry can't eat your tears. The poor can't spend them. They're no comfort to the afflicted and they don't bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

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

In the darkness, I had been afraid that he was evil. At dawn, I realized he had been my friend and guardian, watching over me all night long.

Don't worry about anything—pray about everything instead.

But … why me?" I said. It was the first of the million questions in my mind to come tumbling out of my mouth. "Because there are no more men here," said Magdala. "No fighting men," Tauratanio said. "No fighting men of brave heart and right belief," added Magdala.

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,

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

A work of art speaks a truth we can't speak outright: the truth of the human experience. Love, joy, grief, guilt, beauty—no words can communicate these. We can only represent them in stories and pictures and songs. Art is the way we speak the meaning of our lives.

A metaphor has three parts: the object we are trying to describe, the term we use to describe it, and the idea that is conveyed when the two come together. In this, a metaphor is itself a metaphor for the Trinity. In the Trinity, the object we are trying to describe is God the Father, the term we use to describe it is Jesus the Son, and when we grasp that idea, we are filled with the Spirit.

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)

Future generations would solve the material inequalities in the sex lives of men and women by means of birth control and abortion. Through the miracle of science, a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for their pleasure without consequence or attachment. And, should the medication fail, she is free to have doctors kill the child in her womb and drag it out in pieces to be sold for profit and used for medical experimentation.

The ferociously radical-to-the-death Jesus of the Gospels was transformed here into a bland cheerleader for socially acceptable niceness. That made no sense to me. No one ever got himself crucified for organizing a charity golf tournament.

If God listened to mothers," the rabbi responds severely, "we would all rot away in a bog of security and easy living.

It is the paradox of virtue knit into the fabric of reality: you will not be free unless you are virtuous; you cannot be virtuous unless you are free.

The Good World Project. This too made Winter smile his wintry smile. "To silence the voices of hate that divide us—this is not controversial, this is simply the right thing to do. To direct the resources of all nations toward humanity's shared objectives—this is not controversial. It's the right thing to do. To heal the planet from the wounds inflicted on her . . .

But somehow, after you talked to her for a while, after you got to know her, she started to look really awesome. I thought so anyway. After you found out how warm she was, how kind, how interested she was in what other people had to say. It changed the way she looked . . . I don't really know how to describe it.

This, finally, is the model of all radicalism, in the grip of which men reenact the fall of man as adults so often reenact their childhood traumas. Radicals transgress the paradox of virtue because they claim the knowledge of good and evil for themselves and strip the power to freely choose virtue from others. In this way, they transform their imagined paradise into a living hell.

To explore the mind of man is to know the face of damnation and salvation both—to know them in the only way we can know them, a human way, just as we know light and good and evil and the falling silver rain.

There are things you can describe in life and things you just can't. There are dangers and adventures, miseries and fears that you can tell about and then . . . well, then there's home and joy and love—and those are beyond the power of words to describe.

This same thing happens too, I think, in one of the most profound and important scenes in all of literature: Moses before the burning bush. Like autumn, the bush contains life-and-death in a single eternal process, the growing bush never consumed by the destructive fire that never dies. Like autumn, the bush, when Moses looks at it, reveals itself to be a person: I AM.

Before you lose things, you don't really know you can lose them,

28 It is as if he had begun to suspect—to feel, to sense, to imagine—that there was a realm beyond nature, a living reality that nature only symbolized.

Only Coleridge was philosophically brilliant enough to understand that their declarations about nature—its immortality, its beauty and truth—needed to rest upon the supernatural, "a kind of common sensorium"—as he called Jesus Christ—"the total Idea that modifies all thoughts.

Never give in; never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.