IAN CALDWELL

'The Fifth Gospel' is set entirely inside the Vatican and told from the perspective of a Catholic priest. I'm not Catholic myself, yet authenticity and factual accuracy are very important to me, so the novel required an enormous amount of research.

The Vatican has to strike a difficult balance between running a country and running a religious institution.

...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life ... are failure and age; those are one and the same.

...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

Adulthood it a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

Hope...which is whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plauges and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is onl time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.

Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.

I write about modern people who share a deep sense of connection to the mysteries of the past. I find that I understand myself and my world better when I'm able to peer into history as a mirror.

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

'The Fifth Gospel' is set entirely inside the Vatican and told from the perspective of a Catholic priest. I'm not Catholic myself, yet authenticity and factual accuracy are very important to me, so the novel required an enormous amount of research.

The Vatican has to strike a difficult balance between running a country and running a religious institution.

Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.

Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.

Hope...which is whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plauges and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is onl time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.

Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.

I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

Two people who think they're in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other.

Adulthood it a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life ... are failure and age; those are one and the same.

The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.

Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

A son is a promise that time makes to a man,the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.