Best The Fifth Gospel Quotes by Ian Caldwell

"Never mind that. Just help me set the table."

"Sweetheart, Father Simon’s train is probably just running behind."

"God bless Mona, she wanted our son to take after his dependable, unhurried, satisfied father."

"The contradictions of his own identity are still in his future."

"Simon loves this dish. We used to eat it as kids."

"Simon is a Roman Catholic priest, which means he’ll never marry or have kids."

"The voice on the other end is faint. Far away."

"Please, Alex. Come now. I’m near the east gate, below the villa."

"In the gospels, Jesus comes upon a fisherman named Simon, and renames him Peter."

"A feeling nags at me, like a fingernail scraping against my thoughts."

"Simon, who had made arrangements to sleep in the rectory of my father’s old Greek Catholic church, arrived to find that Orthodox reactionaries had vandalized the doors with spray paint."

"You must be very upset. I’ve had the guest rooms prepared for the three of you to stay here tonight, so tell me where you are and I’ll send a car."

"I’m going to sleep right here." Here. In the open. Under the pope’s window.

"Wrath runs deep in a Greek heart. It is the first word of our literature."

"As they are sinners, so am I. Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison."

"Her family still lives here. A handful of cousins and uncles, most of them plumbers, used to brandish lengths of pipe at boyfriends they disapproved of."

"She echoed some uncertainty within me about who I was and why I needed to exist after my parents already had Simon."

"The gospels say Jesus prepared his followers for the Second Coming by speaking a parable."

"But the waiting, on nights like this, feels like an ache that rattles from an infinite emptiness."

"A poor man's version of the furnishings in the papal palace, in the world's first country to outlaw smoking, he lights up."

"My body is numb with grief. With mourning. Here he is again, returned from the dead."

"The creed of any Bible student is humility. Caution. Patience."

"Deep in the marrow of our religion is the conviction that loss and sacrifice are noble."

"It's a good Christian thing my brother does now, I think to myself, as I sit alone at the table where he refused to mount a defense."

"And Simon, never taking his eyes off me, just stood there. Flat-footed—dead in his paces—he stared into the crowd."

"Everything will be okay, Father. That's a promise."

"The world has been making the same mistake as the Diatessaron without even realizing it."

"Sometimes I wondered if he would sooner make an enemy than assuage a friend so long as the smallest crumb of factual truth hung in the balance."
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"Below us, in Rome, the world is powdered with electric light, but here in the gardens the darkness is so thick it seems liquid."

"Every Vatican boy steals fruit from these trees, and every pope turns a blind eye."

"Every Benedictine house in the world, for the past sixteen hundred years, has obeyed a rule that guests must be greeted as if they’re Christ."

"Learning to control a ball here is like learning to swim by treading upstream in the Tiber."

"What’s good for the shepherd may not be good for the flock. Lay Catholics, lacking scriptural training, may leave this gallery with the impression that John is a second-class gospel."

"For centuries the oldest Christian cities of the East had sent their most precious objects to Constantinople for protection from our enemies."

"In the West, meantime, it had been eight centuries since the fall of ancient Rome, eight centuries of barbarian invasions and foreign overlords and chaos."

"Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes."

"If you’re going to believe what other people tell you, then don’t become priests. Nobody needs priests like that."

"The day that man was killed—I’ve never seen anything like it."

"On paper they wanted this to look like any other day."

"These are Orthodox royalty, outranked only by the ancient brother-bishops of the pope, the patriarchs."

"Fighting the accusations against Simon will be impossible without knowing what happened on that hillside."

"Simon could lose his collar, and here I’m worried about my bullshit job."

"The only advantage of Castel Gandolfo was the privacy."

"Your brother is on the list to testify tomorrow morning."

"We wait and see how powerful your brother’s guardian angel is."

"The job made them grim, methodical, impatient."

"I think we just found out who your brother’s guardian angel is."

"It’s as if we’ve called on the emergency frequency reserved for superheroes."

"I’d sooner have blown out candles in a church."

"The purpose of my work is to present the truth. Not cater to some political agenda."

"The real reason for this phone call is to tell you it's over, Simon. 1204 is irrelevant. The exhibit can't go forward."

"The moment when, with a great flourish, I sign my life away."

"Studying the Diatessaron has taught me what a gross misreading we've been guilty of."

"For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am, among them."

"Though we cannot know our future, or change our past, we humbly ask You to guide us toward Your will."

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and no house divided against itself will stand."

"I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

"God who prohibited the making of graven images would never Himself have made an image."

"Images should not be in churches. What is venerated and worshipped should not be painted on the walls."

"We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible."

"You swear my drivers to secrecy. You forbid testimony. You let swaths of evidence be suppressed. That is a search for truth?"

"Because it’s getting late, and our next witness may be unable to testify since the exhibit begins shortly."

"I’ll be honest with you. Nogara was a pain in the neck. He clung to Andreou like a tick."

"You’re suggesting someone told the accused to do this?"

"Down here, you fight for what you believe in. You fight for it."

"We ask our guests to follow the guided tour of the exhibit."

"You think I planned to kill him? Go to hell, Alex!"

"I had to have surgery! They still won’t let me come back to work!"

"God put me there to help you. I am the one who failed you."

"Of all the wounds on the Turin Shroud, the bloodiest is the spear wound in Jesus’ side. Yet the earthly Jesus was never pierced in his side."

"If you love something, die for it. That’s the message of the gospels."

"The exhibit has given the world permission to believe again."

"The Church is eternal, proof against all setbacks."

"Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us."

"Tonight, a child is born to us. The Christ child, who offers us a new beginning."