Patti Callahan Henry > Quotes

“Cheating and lying aren't struggles, they're reasons to break up.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“Over time, hidden truths morph in the dark soil of deceit into something much worse.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“Sometimes we know who we want to be and what we want to do long... long before we know how to get there.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“If only it were so easy to pick up the broken pieces of life, glue them back together, and cover them with paint like nothing had ever happened.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“Grief wraps around people, takes them to a place they would not go otherwise.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“There were some things that needed to be said even if the person you were saying them to didn't understand; words that must be released from their trapped place where their flapping to get out could cause internal damage.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“You don't always need proof to know something.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“I’d believed— fool that I was— that because I knew this end was coming, I was prepared, that I would not grieve as I had. As if one can pre-grieve and get it out of the way. It’s not true. Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“When you know you love someone, when you know it's finally the right time, you don't just wait around for the right words, you just say the sentences even if they're all mixed up and imperfect.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Coming Up for Air

“The right thing at the wrong time is never the right thing.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“The fantastic and the imaginative aren't escapism . . . Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning. . . It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“There are always consequences to the truth.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“God might not fix things for me, but he would be with me in whatever waited ahead, that was clear.”
― Patti Callahan, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“I was never without a book, just in case there were empty moments to slip into a life that wasn't mine.”
― Patti Callahan Henry

“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, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“What on earth would become of me if I should ever grow brave?”
― Patti Callahan, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“The way stories change us can't be explained,' Padraig says. 'It can only be felt. Like love.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“Every life should be guided and enriched by one book or another, don’t you agree? Certainly, every formative moment in my life has been enriched or informed by a book. You must be very careful about what you choose to read— unless you want to stay stuck in your opinions and hard-boiled thoughts, you must be very careful.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“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, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“People say it all the time--'follow your heart.' What are we supposed to do--take our heart out and walk around behind it--follow it down the sidewalk to the mall? Your feet will lead you to your heart. Ha!
"Maybe it just means you should know your heart, because if you know it, you might do what it says to do. I don't think it means you do whatever you damn well please. I don't think the heart speaks very loudly either--just tosses you hints and whispers.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, When Light Breaks

“We have to know the truth about the past to discover out future.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides

“Stars are made of dust and nitrogen; they are balls of gas and hydrogen. But that isn’t what a star is; it’s only what it is made of.”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“Maybe we are each and every one of us born with our own stories, and we must decide how to tell those stories with our own life, or in a book . . . Or could it be that all our stories come from one larger story?”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“Maybe you aren’t doubting that God will do the best for you, but wondering how painful the best might be.”
― Patti Callahan, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“If you knew all the answers, there'd be no need for trust, little one.”
― Patti Callahan, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not far away,”
― Patti Callahan, Once Upon a Wardrobe

“It is not about how it ends; it is about the journey. The full story. You have to know the full story to care about or know the ending.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, When Light Breaks

“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, Becoming Mrs. Lewis

“Sometimes we tell our stories and sometimes our stories tell us.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, The Bookshop at Water's End