Ted Dekker Quotes

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

It's hard to see things when you're too close. Take a step back and look.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

I've been out on the periphery.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

Once you get away from where you're from, you look at it in a different way.

Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

This is like one thing that I've tried to do, and I think successfully, that when you realize that nothing really belongs to you, you begin to appreciate having an understanding of just where your head is at, and you feel so much better.

… splendid isolation

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that's going on. I feel like I'm in my own bubble.

If you start to believe the hype about yourself, then you start to lose the bigger picture, and your focus is in the wrong place.

Everybody needs to take a little distance from things.

I look at everything from 100,000 feet.

We're not on the outside looking in, we're on the outside looking out.

In this business, if you don't have the capacity to step back and have some sort of relativity about things, you're screwed.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world.

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.