All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

meet and more like a thing that you would discover.

they seemed to belong to a different Catholicism than the perfunctory, godless form he had practiced back in Philadelphia.

in the complicated blackness that exists behind closed eyelids.

The second miracle was this: getting rid of the darkness for good.

No one wanted to see their darkness made manifest, but the reality was that it could not be fought until you saw its shape.

There was a law laid down among the Sorias to not interfere. If a Soria lifted a hand or breathed a word in aid, a darkness would fall on the Soria

as well, and a Saint’s darkness was an even more terrible and powerful thing.

sometimes our darkness is the thing we know the best.

The owls ordinarily roosted once the miracle took place. That night, they did not leave until the Saint told them to go.

Then she would lie inside the metallic nest of the dish and stare up at the sky, imagining herself—her mind, that is, the important part of herself—being projected as far up into the sky as she could see. She would hold her thoughts up there for hours at a time, breathing them back into the altitude if they started to drift down, and then, finally, she would turn those distant thoughts back down to Bicho Raro and consider her home from that great height instead. Things came into better perspective, she felt, when viewed from one thousand feet.

“I do not think the darkness is about being ‘terrible.’ ”

She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words.

“I think the darkness is ab...

It was easy to lose your way without headlights (which is true of a lot of life).

It is, after all, not the tasks people do but the things they do around the edges of them that reveal who they are.

Because of how surely the miracles appealed to owls,

if the owls’ attraction to miracles was beneficial or harmful.

There was, after all, a large difference between the way flowers drew hummingbirds and the way artificial light compelled moths.

“No darkness here,” she whistled. “No miracles, anyway.”

Some feelings are rooted too strongly in the body to exist without it, and this one, desire, is one of them.

It was just that Marisita was not sure that saints and witches were very different in the end.

She felt trapped in between.

woke as a stranger in the world of miracles. He was neither a saint nor a pilgrim.

Bicho Raro by night was a god; Bicho Raro by day was a man.

One would think this unveiled truth would be encouraging, but it had the opposite effect on Pete. His journey before now had felt like a dream, and a dream can always be changed into something else. But when you are awake, the truth is bright and stark, not as willing to bend to the mind’s will. So now Pete truly faced the reality of the plan he had made.

Perhaps a place this vast and an adventure this curious were only for those without holes in their hearts.

an excess of chimney fires and poverty had clogged the fire truck’s hose with prayers and despair and it had split from end to end.

Love is a dangerous thing already, without a pilgrim in it.

a fear that his plan was nothing but smoke tricks to fool himself into feeling better.

Michael had never seen from the outside how it looked to work constantly to avoid feeling, and he could not look away.

Before, the identity of their desired audience had been nebulous, distant. Now, in light of the day’s events, all of their audience was wrapped up in a single person. Daniel Lupe Soria, their beloved cousin. Daniel Lupe Soria, their cherished Saint. Daniel Lupe Soria, lost in darkness.

“Some light for your darkness:

a saint made for martyring.

He dreamed of a day when he would be infamous behind the microphone, Diablo Diablo, devil of the airwaves, and teens would be looking to him to set trends.

Everyone has two faces: the one they wear, and the one

that is beneath it. Joaquin quite suddenly wore the latter.

A desert is a lot like an ocean, if you replace all of the water with air. It stretches out and out and out in unfathomable distance and, in the absence of sunlight, turns to pure black. Sounds become secrets, impossible to verify as true until the light returns. It is not empty merely because you cannot see all of it. And you know in your heart that it isn’t—that it is the opposite of empty once it is dark, because things that do not like to be watche...

Something was there in t...

“The moon loves company, so get your teeth ready.”

Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey—emotion—and hide from the same predator—logic.

Anxiety was merely another brand of her usual considered thought, after all, just one that refused to go away when she asked it nicely or was trying to sleep.)

So Beatriz was not afraid in this moment, but only because she didn’t have enough information to be afraid.

She was not a monster, but she was a pilgrim, and that was just as dangerous.

someone who showed her care for someone else in intensely practical ways.

The problem with ideas is that they never come all at once. They emerge like prairie dogs. An edge of ear, or the tip of a nose, and sometimes even the whole head. But if you look straight at an idea too fast, it can vanish back into the ground before you’re even sure of what you’ve seen. Instead, you have to sneak up on it slowly, looking out of the corner of your eye, and then and only then you might glance up to get a clear look.

We don’t quite understand miracles. This is the way of most divine things; saints and miracles belong to a different world and use a different set of rules.

But these oddities were no random punishments but rather messages specific to each pilgrim. The darkness made flesh was a concrete puzzle that, if solved, provided the mental tools the pilgrim needed to move on.

The intention of every Soria miracle was the same: to heal the mind.

This trial was not a punishment, he reminded himself. This trial was a miracle. But it did not feel like a miracle.

He knew the miracles were meant to teach the pilgrims something about themselves.