Quotes from Douglas Wilson

Sensory experience should not be draped on top of the story as sort of a last-minute decoration. Done right, it is woven into the fabric of the story, and as this happens, the reader is woven in, right alongside the description. In giving advice to writers, E. L. Doctorow once said that good writing should communicate more than the mere fact that it is raining. The reader should feel rained on. A

Your writing advances a particular view of the world. Pretending that it doesn't just confuses everybody, starting with you. RECOMMENDED

13. What is biblical masculinity? It is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.

There is a vast difference between the dutiful Christian citizen and the craven Christian who cites passages out of context in order to justify a continuation of his cowardice.

Hardship in a story is grace; hardship without a story is just pain. Childrearing is the opportunity that you have to love your children in preparation for a harvest, but that means you need to have the harvest in mind.

This is why stories like this, with great evils in them, are necessary for children to read. Kids just got here—they are still figuring things out, and stories are one of the central realities that can help them. Chesterton says somewhere that stories about dragons and knights do not teach children to fear dragons. They had dragons under the bed already. They had the fear already. The stories actually teach children that dragons can be killed. And

Preachers of the gospel must also be students of the culture they are sent to. A minister must be a student of the Word, but he must also be a student of men. He must study them—not just men generally, but the men of his own era, the men to whom he is charged to bring the gospel. When the Lord speaks to each of the angels of the seven churches of Asia, the message for each church is different. Same gospel, different sins, and so a different message applying that gospel.

Faith is not wishful thinking; faith apprehends the promises of God found in Scripture. "The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee" (Ps. 102:28). Faith sees a son as established, and the work of faith goes on to establish him. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

If you have told twenty-eight people this week that "he missed his nap today" as an excuse for his disobedience, then perhaps you ought to re-evaluate. We all know there are times when this is not an excuse but a reasonable explanation. But if you find yourself resorting to excuses all the time, then you are just trying to get people to overlook your lack of wisdom and discipline.

Perfectionists want static categories; they want things to be defined and to stay put. They want the kingdom of God to stay here, right where we put it, and they want the kingdom of man to stay right there, on the unbelieving shelf.

Become the kind of person the kind of person you would like to marry would like to marry.

Education is the process of selling someone on books.

God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents...

Immodest and attractive is easy. Modest and repulsive is easy too. But modest and attractive is an art form.

This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.

To reject Christ because the church has sin of this sort in it is like rejecting hospitals because they are full of sick people.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

If boys don't learn, men won't know.

Remember that Jesus has a body in this world. You are His hands and feet. But remember also that His hands and feet were pierced.

God picks us up where we are, not where we should have been

If there are weeds in my garden, I have a problem. But it does not lead me to question the existence of lettuce.

Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn't honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must have feet and hands.

A lot of aspiring writers quote the right people, but they do so like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. They quote Austen like Mary quoted her eighteenth-century bromides, and were Austen here to see them do it, she'd slap them right into her next book, and it wouldn't be pretty.

Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don't own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?