Daniel Taylor Quotes

Stories make it possible for us to be human.

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

Nothing worthwhile is easy.

The least livable life is the one without coherence-nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful.... The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us.

Broken stories can be healed. Diseased stories can be replaced by healthy ones. We are free to change the stories by which we live.

Few things are as encouraging as the realization that things can be different and that we have a role in making them so.

The ability to see our lives as stories rather than unrelated, random events increases the possibility for significant and purposeful action.

We do not choose between a life of difficulty and a life of ease. We simply choose for what purpose we will work, sometimes suffer, and hopefully endure.

If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.

This was football played at the speed of ice hockey and the ball was in play for only 53 minutes of the 90. The Premiership at its highest level is enthralling, edge-of-the-seat stuff, but sometimes it is too fast and frenetic for its own good.

A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.

For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfilment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won't "wither away" as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life‚ - sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.

We live in stories the way fish live in water.

We're not in people's faces, but I guess we're kind of in people's ears.

It is simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the reflective Christian that believers are called to live out their faith in the church. No institution has accomplished so much for good in the world; none has fallen so short of its calling! The church is God-ordained, God-inspired, but accomplishes its work through human beings subject to every possible failing.

Reflection on the infinite seems to call, almost by definition, for infinite reflection.

We're on an indie label. We don't have mass marketing behind us, and we don't have big budgets. We do our own thing. We do exactly what we want to do. We produce our own music. We write ourselves. We record ourselves. We mix ourselves. The artwork is done by my brother. That's not selling out. We're doing exactly what we want to do.

To have your music used on television and in movies, that's our way of getting it across to people. We're not on the radio all the time. It's the only way to get your music heard.

I think all of us set out to try and reach as many people. That's the whole point of being in a band: trying to get your music out there. So, any opportunity to do that, within reason. We're informed about where our music is going to be used; we get to say yes or no. There are things we can turn down, and there are things we can agree to. When it comes to movies and stuff like that, it's great for us. I don't think it's selling out. Maybe 10 or 20 years ago it was seen as selling out, but nowadays I think it's the only way to get your music out there.

It was always going to be a blues, soul, and rock-'n'-roll thing, because those are our ingredients. That's where we come from, and that's how we write. I think it has just become larger. We've just been able to use our imaginations so much more.

There are a lot of war memorials around the UK. It's usually a part of the war memorials. I loved the way The Glorious Dead sounded. It's kind of a strange thing to say. There's nothing particularly glorious about being dead. It sounded like a strange, horror film. It just grew from there, really. It seemed quite apt for the record. We're kind of obsessed with zombie movies and horror films. It seemed like it just fit, at the time.

Pull a thread in my story and feel the tremor half a world and two millenia away.