Quotes from Ian Caldwell

I write about modern people who share a deep sense of connection to the mysteries of the past. I find that I understand myself and my world better when I'm able to peer into history as a mirror.

Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.

...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life ... are failure and age; those are one and the same.

Two people who think they're in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other.

The magic of Paul's intelligence is that he has more patience than anyone I've ever met, and with it he simply wears problems down. To count a hundred million stars, he told me once, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possibly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would only take three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. And that is Paul's gift: an intuition of just how much a person can do slowly.

My old friend has gained weight. His shirt is wrinkled and his hair is too long. We clamp hands on each other and trade kisses on the cheek, holding on longer than we should, because as the distance has grown, so has the enthusiasm of our greetings. Someday we will be the greatest of strangers.

there's reason to believe neither account reflects the facts. But the authors of both gospels—whoever those authors really were—believed Jesus was the Savior, so He must've been born in Bethlehem, as the Old Testament predicts.

His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn't control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in objects, far from his own.

What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared.

Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes.

bullies the light out of the room.

The motto here is that a new door opens every time you push another man out a window.

Time is what disperses us.

a boy can't imagine how hard he will find it, someday, to forgive his own enemies. Or his own loved ones. He has no inkling that good men can sometimes find it impossible to forgive themselves. The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone.

Slowly, though, I find that the woman coming to my aid is no longer the woman I married. Rather, she is the wife and mother who left behind husband and son, who lived for years in tortured solitude, and who stands before me now as a virtuoso of the self-recrimination I'm only beginning to learn. She is helping me because she loves me, because she knows this darkness and has its map. There is indeed no medicine. But there is a journey I no longer have to make alone.

A death wish is not the same as a willingness to die.

So this is how my friend died. Because I taught him how to read the gospels. And because he had the bravery to speak out about what they revealed.

After Father died, she told me that it felt strange to have hands anymore, what with no one to hold them.

A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

Because every desire has its proper object. It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldn't. The world confuses into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn't belong.

Boia is trying to force Simon to talk. Nowak is trying to keep the exhibit a secret.

What puzzles me most is the disappearance of the Diatessaron and where it might be now.

Há uma velha regra que minhas irmãs me ensinaram. Sempre que você se encontrar com uma garota, faça-o em algum lugar bem conhecido. Os restaurantes franceses não impressionam se você não conseguir ler o menu, e filmes intelectuais são um tiro pela culatra se você não compreende a trama.