Patricia Storace Quotes

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.

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

Believe only when you grasp the consequences of your belief.

Many more have died of attempting love than victory, and countless numbers hate love more than war. Honor has often been the dear prize awarded to the killers of lovers. The epics of war have always and still outnumber the epics of love. For those who love deeply and greatly gain a clairvoyant, excruciating awareness of the fear and suffering of the world along with their joy, which few warriors could endure. Who is not more truly afraid of a love story than of a tale of war?

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.

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.

Men hunt by pretending to be the brothers of the prey they seek, and women hunt by impersonating the mothers of their prey.

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.

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.

There are no separate lives; each life and individual character exists in relation to every other life: dead, living, yet to live.

A dinner made by a great cook is a vision of the world to come.

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.

All souls burn, some give light.

Truth comes to us in resemblance, in shade. In moonlight. In grasping what exists through what we cannot make exist.