Patti Callahan Quotes

• “What on earth would become of me if I should ever grow brave?”

  Patti Callahan

  16 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “Much of what I’d done — mistakes, poems, manipulations, success and books and sex — had been done merely to get love. To get it. To answer my question: do you love me? . . . From that moment on, the love affair I would develop would be with my soul. [God] was already part of me; that much was clear. And now this would be where I would go for love — to the God in me. No more begging or pursuing or needing. Possibly it was only a myth, Jack’s myth [Til We Have Faces], that could have obliterated the false belief that I must pursue love in the outside world — in success, in acclaim, in performance, in a man.
  
  The Truth: I was beloved of God.
  
  Finally I could stop trying to force someone or something else to fill that role”

  Patti Callahan

  15 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “It is not hopeless,” he said with surety. “It is uncertain, and this is the cross God always gives us in life, uncertainty. But it is not hopeless.”

  Patti Callahan

  14 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “God might not fix things for me, but he would be with me in whatever waited ahead, that was clear.”

  Patti Callahan

  12 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Maybe you aren’t doubting that God will do the best for you, but wondering how painful the best might be.”

  Patti Callahan

  12 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “If you knew all the answers, there'd be no need for trust, little one.”

  Patti Callahan

  10 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Do you know the German word, sehnsucht," he asked.
  
  "Yes," I answered. "The idea of an inconsolable longing for what we don't understand. You believe that longing is for God. Or heaven. And that we can confuse it with longing for someone or something else.”

  Patti Callahan

  8 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “We’re connected everywhere. Even before we met, we were all of us tied together with these funny little threads. I love those small hints that God brings people together and says, ‘Here you go. This one’s for you.”

  Patti Callahan

  7 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “I’d once heard Jack say, or had I read it, that sometimes a soul would cry out, “Thy will be done” to God and other times, with fury say instead, “Fine, have it your way.”

  Patti Callahan

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “You tolerate what you must when it becomes your reality.”

  Patti Callahan

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “And now here you are, at peace in your Garden of Eden with your brother and your acreage and your students and your Inklings and you friends and your quaint town. All these things both inspire you and protect you. But a change might be in order. Not a change that disrupts, but one that expands." I paused. "Let new things touch your soul.”

  Patti Callahan

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “C. S. Lewis: Yes, Joy, I know that pain well. When we write the truth, there isn’t always a grand group applauding. But write it we must.”

  Patti Callahan

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “If I attempt virtue it brings light to my life. If I indulge desires, I invite fog and confusion.”

  Patti Callahan

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Why did the everyday-ness of my life sometimes feel constricting, when the everyday-ness was everything”

  Patti Callahan

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “How do you make a book? I want to make a book.” “First I try to write the very books that I want to read. I see my books in pictures. I watch them unfold, and then I write about it. I tell what I see, and then I fill in the gaps.”

  Patti Callahan

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “I've spent all of my life in an attempt to find truth and moral good and then to live it. I can't discard my moral habits for feelings, which are just that.
  (The moral virtues)
  They are my footholds for moral goodness. Morality is about choice.”

  Patti Callahan

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “We can't just surrender to our every desire. Man must have his principles and live by them regardless. Our nature must be controlled or it can ruin our lives.”

  Patti Callahan

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “I must know when it is enough. And I must trust God — again and again I was learning and relearning to trust the truth who had entered my sons’ nursery. The rusty and decrepit habit of trusting in only myself, only abiding in my own ability to make things happen, died hard and slow.”

  Patti Callahan

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “...waiting and longing are often the cheap fuel of desire.”

  Patti Callahan

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “I'm trying because I must.”

  Patti Callahan

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Being a Christian isn’t what most think it is—all rules and regulations.” She clinked her glass with the red lipstick stain on the rim against mine. “It is all trust and surrender and transformation, at its best.”

  Patti Callahan

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “How can we know what has filtered into our work? This is precisely why we must be careful of what we read.”

  Patti Callahan

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “I'd felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of love we shared--an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we'd traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey--riddled with both pain and joy--culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.”

  Patti Callahan

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “But I’m still writing articles for Esquire and working on a novel about an English teacher in New York City. I’ve titled it Up the Down Staircase. Sounds exciting, right?” She rolled those beautiful eyes and laughed that beautiful laugh. “It will probably never see the light outside my writing room.”

  Patti Callahan

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Whatever we face together is better than never knowing you at all.”

  Patti Callahan

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement