Eliot Pattison > Quotes

“I tell them that the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Lord of Death

“Investigations, meditations, careers, relationships were much the same, he mused. They failed because no one thought to ask the right question.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“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, Water Touching Stone

“our life is the instrument we use to experiment with the truth.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“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, Bone Mountain

“You need to let the spirits have their way Shan”
― Eliot Pattison, Soul of the Fire

“A man’s life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“Our demons, they have a way of becoming self-fulfilling.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“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, The Skull Mantra

“If you are not careful your soul will wear out long before your body.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“He said you must always step forward from where you stand.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“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, The Skull Mantra

“The more one understands the world...the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood." Dakpo to Shan”
― Eliot Pattison, The Lord of Death

“Here,” Crispin continued, “the war is waged in the forest mostly, in the unmapped wilderness. Soldiers go into the forest and are never seen again. Settlers go in, entire families, and disappear. Sometimes it’s French troops, but mostly it’s the red savages raiding from the north, Huron and Abenaki, the French allies. The lucky ones are killed. You can read the stories of what the Indians do to prisoners, and hear more in the markets. Men hung over fires and roasted alive, fathers butchered alive in front of their children. They cut away scalps. Some say when a man loses his scalp, his spirit just spills out into the dirt and dries up,” he added in a hollow tone.”
― Eliot Pattison, Bone Rattler

“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, The Lord of Death

“but”
― Eliot Pattison, Soul of the Fire

“hundred years. The end of a place Shan had come”
― Eliot Pattison, Beautiful Ghosts

“He looked calmer somehow. It wasn’t peace of mind he had found, but maybe a new deliberation.”
― Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

“What is the way of human life, the student asked. An open-eyed man falling down a well, the master replied.”
― Eliot Pattison, Beautiful Ghosts