Christopher Castellani > Quotes

“I’m grateful for all you’ve brought to me, and for all you’ve brought me to, for all that you bring out of me.”
― Christopher Castellani, Leading Men

“she would indeed like to tell that kind of story, except that it requires a plot, “the absolute line between two points which [she’s] always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” What’s despicable about the absolute line between two points is its danger of becoming a single story. For Paley, there was no “defining” experience of women or Jews or New York or activists or the 1960s, or of one female Russian Jewish activist-writer in New York in 1965. There were stops and starts, inconsistencies, loyalties forged and broken, discordant voices. People made themselves up as they went along. In the meantime, there was daily life to endure.”
― Christopher Castellani, The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story

“But to forget completely is an insult. A dishonor to the people who loved you—”
― Christopher Castellani, The Saint of Lost Things: A Novel

“Not once in those years with Tenn did he question his right to gorge himself on beauty until he burst, and then to drop everything to chase the deer into the woods for more. He should have known better. No one gets away with such a life.”
― Christopher Castellani, Leading Men

“She wishes them not luck or money; they will have both, as much as they want, or is necessary. Instead she wishes them fearlessness in all things: in love, yes, but also in work, in expectation, in the leap from the high rocks, in looking back, and in forgetting.”
― Christopher Castellani, The Saint of Lost Things: A Novel