More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Perhaps this darkness was meant to teach him trust, or humility, or despair.
The knowing had not helped him.
Perhaps Daniel was meant to learn how difficult miracles were.
from the distinct feeling that he wasn’t alone. There was something out there in the night, something that had drawn near as soon as he’d broken the taboo.
Perhaps this was not healing darkness at all but rather the opposite: a hellish entity sent to caper around and gobble up a fallen saint.
This miracle makes the darkness inside you visible in amazing and peculiar ways.
The saints cannot help you tackle your darkness after you receive the miracle, or they will, ah, they will bring darkness on themselves, a worse darkness than any ordinary man’s. Or woman’s, golly.”
Wipe your eyes, everyone, it’ll be all right, and if it won’t, it’ll be a good story for someone else.
Yes, they all knew how he was. But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.
It was better than eating only memories, though.
He had performed the common mistake
that many do when confronted with the idea of the miraculous: He had assumed it meant magical. Miracles often look like magic, but a proper miracle is also awesome, sometimes fearful, and always vaguely difficult to truly wrap your mortal head around.
one of many recipients of peculiar miracles.
Priests are a bit like owls in that some of them also have a sense for when miracles are afoot, and he was having that suspicion now.
By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things
we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.
the same obsession with the handsomeness of thought.
Beatriz wanted to know if people like herself and her father—people supposedly without feelings—could be in love, or if they were not capable of producing the correct quantity of emotion to fill an emotional partner’s glass for very long.
She could not tell if it was safer to
stop a love story before it ever truly got under way.
These seem like intractable opposites, but only if you are being logical about it.
Love, especially new love, is gifted at disordering them.
If Daniel truly was listening, they needed to put on a show that felt like a miracle.
We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.
things felt like change.
wasn’t one to start a fire in a room that didn’t seem to be in the mood for smoke,
He liked Patsy Cline, and he liked Loretta Lynn. Women with deep voices and a sense of history, singing in low, round tones over plucked and syrupy steel guitars.
it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.’ If you’re missing someone tonight, know that I, Diablo Diablo, am, too. It’s an enormous sky out there with a lot of stars above it and a lot of folks underneath it, and all of us, stars and human, are missing someone in the dark. But I, Diablo Diablo, think that if we’re all out there missing someone, that means that we’re all really together on that one note, aren’t we? So none of us are really alone as long as we’re lonely.”
but night here had always been a comfortable time for her, a time when her thoughts could stretch into the quiet without anyone else’s voice intruding.
It was very quiet. No one else would have seen if not for the desert. But when the desert heard Pete Wyatt singing a love song, it took notice. The desert loved him, after all, and wanted him happy.
As she danced with Pete, Beatriz was thinking that perhaps this was what performing the miracle felt like for Daniel. The sensation inside her felt like it came both from inside her and from someplace very much outside her, which was impossible and illogical and miraculous.
because holiness was love,
You can hear a miracle a long way after dark, even when you are dying.
the slow but urgent movement of a far-off miracle slowly drawing closer.
but with only starved light coming from the fast-setting sun and with only starved light coming to him through his eyes,
It seemed mundane and inappropriate for a Saint to die from lack of water rather than from an epic battle for his soul.
Perhaps he had been just a man playing at God.
He knew he was loved, and he knew how love can become a blunt and relentless weapon at death.
He who wants heaven must pay.
This is the way of our work: We cannot help but color it with the paint of our feelings, both good and bad.
In that quiet, she could feel the prickle of an oncoming miracle, but she couldn’t tell if it was a Soria miracle or merely the potential miracle of a life-changing radio station in a box truck.
preferred to remain a nonparticipant in most wars, including this one.
letters about all the strange kinds of love we feel for our family and friends.
‘Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.’
Merely disobedient, not lost to darkness.
This was his miracle and he was drunk with this electric holiness.
She thought that by so doing she was improving the situation, but anyone who has held an argument with a silent participant will realize that silence sometimes can be more frustrating than a defense.
a voice to pilgrims in the night.
“We are not afraid because we are cowards.”
“He wanted us to think about why we do the things we do.
