Ian Caldwell Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 43 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ian Caldwell.
Famous Quotes By Ian Caldwell
People lie. People disagree. People make mistakes. To find out the truth, you have to know how to search for it. — Ian Caldwell
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) — Ian Caldwell
After Father died, she told me that it felt strange to have hands anymore, what with no one to hold them. — Ian Caldwell
Never mix books and bed. In the spectrum of excitement, sex & thought were on opposite ends. Both to be enjoyed, but never at the same time. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
What puzzles me most is the disappearance of the Diatessaron and where it might be now. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes. — Ian Caldwell
bullies the light out of the room. — Ian Caldwell
The two hardest things to contemplate in life ( ... ) are failure and age, and those are one and the same. — Ian Caldwell
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 ... — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
Two people who think they're in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other. — Ian Caldwell
The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong. — Ian Caldwell
Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness. — Ian Caldwell
The motto here is that a new door opens every time you push another man out a window. — Ian Caldwell
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. — 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. — Ian Caldwell
He told me once that praying is like being a soccer coach and calling saints off the bench. — Ian Caldwell
Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
We both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along. — Ian Caldwell
Boia is trying to force Simon to talk. Nowak is trying to keep the exhibit a secret. — Ian Caldwell
Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas wit 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 bun, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see. — Ian Caldwell
Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it. — Ian Caldwell
Hope, ... which whispered from Pandora's box 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 outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion ... It's a law of motion, a fact of physics ... , no different from the stages of white dwarves and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years. — Ian Caldwell
The Vatican has to strike a difficult balance between running a country and running a religious institution. — Ian Caldwell
'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. — Ian Caldwell
When God became human, He made Himself into an image. By His own incarnation, He shattered the prohibition against art. — Ian Caldwell
I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it. — Ian Caldwell
So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. — Ian Caldwell
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. — Ian Caldwell
That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find. — Ian Caldwell