Stephen R. Lawhead Quotes

“You spend too much time alone, too much time watching television, and too little time cultivating the inner man. You live in a squalid little flat in what is referred to as a no-go zone from which your friends, of whom you see less and less, have all fled for the suburbs long ago with wives and sprogs in tow. You are exceedingly unlucky in love, having invested years in a romantic relationship which, as you know only too well, is neither romantic nor much of a relationship. In short, you have all the social prospects of a garden gnome.”

“It had long been an ambition to find the line of force that might lead to the Holy Land in the time of Christ.”

“When heaven joins the battle against you, who could stand?”

“Humility, if it comes at all, almost always comes too late.”

“What makes you so certain?"
"But I am not certain," I told him. "Nothing is certain. You want certainty?"
"Yes!"
"Then you want death.”

“He was a stranger in a strange land: lost in the cosmos, a man with neither compass nor guide, sitting in a tomb in Egypt surrounded by the dead, with Giles—a man his own age, but separated by class and sensibility and four hundred years—looking to him for answers.”

“The great hulking eminence of the stone-age mound stood out as an ominous dark shadow.”

“When next you turn your eyes to the vast reaches of heaven, gentlemen, you would be well advised to remember that not only is it far more magnificent than the human mind can fathom, it is far more subtle. All the universe is permeated, upheld, knit together, conjoined, encompassed, and contained by the Elemental Ether, which we recognise as an all-pervading, responsive, and intelligent field of energy, eternal and inexhaustible, which is nothing less than the ground of our very being and the wellspring of our existence—that which in ages past and present men have been pleased to call God.”

“The very idea of a near-infinite array of universes made his head swim.”

“His last thought, as sleep overtook him, was that it was true what Cosimo had said: the universe was far stranger than anyone imagined, or could imagine.”

“Do not think it impossible just because it has never happened.
- Friar Tuck”

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”

“Truth is a constant delight to those that love her; such beauty holds no power to offend.”

“Knowledge is a burden--once taken up, it can never be discarded.”

“Words are worth little when the heart refuses to hear. Therefore, judge us by our works.”

“I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you.”

“People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen.”

“If the heat doesn’t kill you,” he mused, “the flies surely will.”

“Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways.”

“Once again he felt the now-familiar tingle on his skin, as when, just before a lightning strike, the air becomes electrically charged.”

“Alea iacta est. The die has been cast.”

“Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.”

“London had vanished. In place of the lively, thrusting metropolitan conurbation was an empty rural wilderness of damp brown fields under low autumnal skies.”

“Here’s to dodgy adventures with disreputable relatives!”

“You really don’t want to get lost.”

“How very bright this empire of stars, he mused. Which poet had said that?”

“Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life.”

“If her hunch was right, the earl’s explorations were connected in some way to ley travel: that peculiar phenomenon that had plucked her from the twenty-first century and dropped her so rudely into the seventeenth.”

“Before Egypt, long before travelling to that time and place—or any other—became even a remote possibility, Mina had paid her dues. Haltingly, painstakingly, maddeningly.”

“Getting lost is the least of your worries.”

“You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden.”

“We in our present generation stand on the cusp of a new and glorious dawn when mastery of these energies lies fully within our grasp as secret yields to inquiry, which yields to experimentation, which leads to verification and duplication, which, in the final course, leads to knowledge.”

“Even well-known words were often pronounced differently and could have unfamiliar meanings; connotations were not fixed, but fluid. Definitions drifted. He was constantly brought up short by the sudden realization that what he thought he had said was not at all what he meant—at least as it had been understood by his hearers. Still, he was coming to grips with the slippery speech, and his confidence was growing.”

“Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really—standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot.”

“The air crackled with the presage of lightning, and a heavy mist descended around them.”

“Little Archie’s story is darker, more desperate, and yet drearily familiar.”

“These dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape.”

“None of us ever knows what impact we have on the world around us.”

“But isn’t that hazardous—messing with events?”

“See here, if a simple act of kindness or generosity, such as buying a loaf of bread for some poor working women, can mean that wholesale death and destruction will be avoided—why, a man would be a monster who had it in his power to alleviate all that suffering yet stood by and did nothing.”

“Certainty sent a sick dread snaking through his gut: he was being stalked.”

“A favourite saying in China—which she had heard on occasion from her own grandmother—was that the threads of life are easy to weave, but difficult to untangle.”