Stephen R. Lawhead Quotes

I will write: for myself, for those who come after, and for the voices that cry out not to be forgotten.

Knowledge is a burden – once taken up, it can never be discarded.

Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist — for we would be no longer who we are.

For ourselves, Mighty Father, I pray you keep us from the sin of hatred, keep us from the sin of vengeance, keep us from the sin of despair, but protect us from the wicked schemes of our enemies.

I saw Byzantium in a dream, and knew that I would die there. That vast city seemed to me a living thing: a great golden lion... I felt the dread jaws close on me as I stood screaming.

Then I awoke; but my waking brought neither joy nor relief. For I rose not to life, but to the terrible certainty of death. I was to die, and the golden towers of Byzantium would be my tomb. ~ Aidan

The female heart is a world unto itself, incomprehensible to men. Yet I perceive that you have been of a mood today: pensive, contemplative, hesitant, expectant. And you have spent the better part of the day watching me as if you thought I might follow your merlin into the sky and never return.

To protect those least able to protect themselves. That much, at least, has not changed. That was ever the sole purpose and duty of kingship. Since the beginning of time it has not changed.

He also possessed Aurelius' curious innocence in battle: the fearless forgetting which led him to attempt and to achieve the impossible. This would, of course, come to be noticed much later. But even now he could be seen to exhibit a certain disregard for his own safety. I recognized it well, and knew its source, for I had ridden with Aurelius.
In anyone else it would have been called carelessness. Or foolishness, more like. But it was never that. Arthur simply did not feel afraid. Daring, bravery, boldness, valor - these are qualities of overcoming fear.
What is it, then, when there is no fear?

All he had, in fact, was Merlin's shining promise.

..none of this surprised me; it was as if this meeting between us was foreordained by a force greater than either of us. I know I had the events wheeling swiftly over a well-traveled course to a destination long ago established. I felt as if I was merely saying the words I had been destined to say. If there was no surprise, neither was there fear or alarm. The circumstance seemed both right and natural — as if we had talked this way a thousand times, and knew well what the other would say... This is the only truth we can know in life. Nothing else in the world is certain — only this: that a man and woman should come together in love.

I raised my spear to heaven. 'For God and Britain!' I cried, and my cry was answered in kind. And then I was racing down the hillside, my cloak rippling out behind me, the wind singing from my dark-glinting spearhead.

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.

I will weep no more for the lost, asleep in their water graves.

Bitter the day of birth, for death is its companion. Yet, though life be cold and cruel, we are not without a last consolation. For to die in one world is to be born into another. Let all men hear and remember!

Thus, the world is changed — not with a sword, but with a word.