Quotes from Ian Caldwell

O jeito de um garoto argumentar é encontrar uma posição defensiva e mantê-la, mesmo quando ela não é sincera.

É melhor amar alguma coisa que possa amá-lo também.

He told me once that praying is like being a soccer coach and calling saints off the bench.

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep his dreams in check, but there's nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope. The

A priest can forgive a stranger so quickly that 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. I hope my son will always remain a stranger to those sins

The Greek Orthodox bishops made a point of snubbing John Paul. He didn't complain. They insulted him. He didn't defend himself. They demanded he apologize for Catholic sins from centuries ago. And John Paul, speaking on behalf of one billion living souls and the untold Catholic dead, apologized.

The Vatican has to strike a difficult balance between running a country and running a religious institution.

'The Fifth Gospel' is set entirely inside the Vatican and told from the perspective of a Catholic priest. I'm not Catholic myself, yet authenticity and factual accuracy are very important to me, so the novel required an enormous amount of research.

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.

The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.

Hope...which is whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.

The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

Inde fernut, titidem qui vivere debeat annos, corpre de patrio parvum phenica renasci' It's from Ovid. It means, 'A little phoenix is born anew from the father's body, fated to live the same number of years.

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

Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you'd thing the old man slept on the bottom bunk, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see.

Because every desire has its proper object...people spend their lives wanting things the shouldn't. The world confuses them into taking heir love and aiming it where it doesn't belong...All it takes to be happy is to love the right things, in the right amounts. Not money. Not books. People. Adults who don't understand that never feel fulfilled...

They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage." (Rule of Four, 54-55)

When God became human, He made Himself into an image. By His own incarnation, He shattered the prohibition against art.

With that in mind, I try to imagine the greatest gift I could've given my father. And as sleep descends on me, the answer seems strangely clear: my faith in his idols. That was what he wanted all along - to feel that we were united by something permanent, to know that as long as he and I believed in the same thing, we would never be apart.

The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone.

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep is dreams in check, but there's nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.

Deep in the marrow of our religion is the conviction that loss and sacrifice are noble. To surrender something is the highest proof of Christian duty.

People lie. People disagree. People make mistakes. To find out the truth, you have to know how to search for it.