The Book of Heaven Quotes

“They lay together like a word and a comma, asleep within an unfinished sentence.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“All souls burn, some give light.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“One sees in God only what one worships.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“You cannot know how many other miracles one sole miracle begets. She was not a savior. She did not confer salvation. She said we were to be the saviors. She said we know God only through each other. That God is not in us, but between us. That we deliver God to each other, like a flame passed from cupped hand to cupped hand. We bring God to life in each other.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Believe only when you grasp the consequences of your belief.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“In a story, you must always listen for the voice that you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.... Speech denied will burst its dam and become a flood of song. Storied silenced on earth will catapult into Heaven, visible wherever we turn our faces, glittering irrevocably, forever.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Women, it is said, are inferior, amoral, animal and satanic. In which case, being born is either insulting, or meaningless.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“...men hunt by pretending to be the brothers of the prey they seek, and women hunt by impersonating the mothers of their prey.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“...hatred can either strike us dead, like lightning, or illuminate us. It shocks us into seeing what is hidden in the landscape. Hatred can be confined to reason, but kept from the heart.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“... there are no separate lives; each life and individual character exists in relation to every other life: dead, living, yet to live.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“All the elements of the universe -- fire, earth, air and water -- are assembled in a loaf of bread.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“There is more to see than we have been permitted; there are heavens unseen behind the heavens of our perception.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Truth comes to us in resemblance, in shade. In moonlight. In grasping what exists through what we cannot make exist.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“The taste of water, the essential, the pure, the necessary, when you are thirsty, first drunk ardently, and then slowly, is the taste of truth itself.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Every beauty -- whether of sight, sound, or taste -- has a dimension of the metaphysical. Beauty...moves us so powerfully by making us present at the creation of a world, bringing us into existence.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“What you do and what you are gradually become the same thing, and are identical when you die. And what you have done to another person becomes a part of your substance as surely as a fruit you have eaten.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“She had thought because he loved her body that he cherished it. But now she saw that he took her body to be a dream of his own. It gave him pleasure, it gave him work, it gave him comfort, and profit. It was even more completely his body than his own, since if he needed to, he could discard it. Nothing she had imagined about who she was to him was true. At that moment, she became his widow.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Each human must invent human love, a chance that will be given to you in becoming human. And for all the atrocity they have done and will do, it is still through human love, and no other, that appetite, desire, and pleasure themselves become the source of ethics, which knowledge makes inseparable from love”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“Souraya thought those days that she knew so many songs about the misery of love because pain kept love within the boundaries of time, and knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon of birth and death; it was like the eternal life the prophets spoke of. A gesture, a kiss, a task, a sentence had a golden elemental endlessness, like the scenes in the murals painted in the island houses.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“And what does God ask of you?”
“To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven

“We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn’t hear, or wouldn’t believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.”
― Patricia Storace, The Book of Heaven