Eliot Pattison Quotes & Sayings

I said I was looking for the temple of the saints, in order to find myself. He told me I didn't need the temple, he would show me all I needed to know. Here is what it takes, he said, and he set his burden on the ground and stood straight. But what do I do when I go home? I asked. Simple, he said. When you go home you do this - and he put the burden back on his shoulder. — Eliot Pattison

hundred years. The end of a place Shan had come — Eliot Pattison

Our life is the instrument we use to experiment with the truth. — Eliot Pattison

You need to let the spirits have their way Shan — Eliot Pattison

It is a mistake to think of courage as something you show to others. True courage is only something you show to yourself. — Eliot Pattison

Shan stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as though it would violate his teachers who still sat behind prison wire in Lhadrung. — Eliot Pattison

If you are not careful your soul will wear out long before your body. — Eliot Pattison

Our demons, they have a way of becoming self-fulfilling. — Eliot Pattison

Investigations, meditations, careers, relationships were much the same, he mused. They failed because no one thought to ask the right question. — Eliot Pattison

Breathes life into a vital but oft-neglected chapter of our history. Amy Belding Brown has turned an authentic drama of Indian captivity into a compelling, emotionally gripping tale that is at once wrenching and soulful. — Eliot Pattison

Who's to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change and it changed. — Eliot Pattison

Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty and ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look. — Eliot Pattison

The more one understands the world ... the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood. Dakpo to Shan — Eliot Pattison

He said you must always step forward from where you stand. — Eliot Pattison

I tell them that the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you. — Eliot Pattison