All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

And this was yet another miracle the Sorias had not witnessed for a very long time: hope.

She found it depressing, how fast memories were replaced by rumors. Tragedy left behind such subtle artifacts.

he had somehow forgotten how tenacious love was, even in the face of fear.

“I’m not afraid.” This was not true, but she wanted it to be true badly enough that the difference did not matter.

There are many kinds of bravery.

Lightning and love are created in very similar ways.

the air felt remarkably charged, prepared for either lightning or love. The wind was full of words not yet said, miracles not yet performed, and electricity not yet discharged.

“There’s no point broadcasting into a void,”

the spiritual weather was finally breaking.

tried not to think about all the saints who were listening.

like a biblical punishment.

If you were the sort who liked to sing sad songs, you sang sad songs. If you were the sort who liked to stay alive, you moved to the city.

working it out with God. God didn’t seem to be working through it very quickly,

worn to ordinariness by the slow-motion tragedy of life.

the truth was, years of doing what needed to be done and nothing else was getting to him;

the slow-motion tragic

tireless.

they were witnessing a rock-and-roll saint.

Edgar decided he would no longer live his life in his diminished state; he would become, like Elvis, the loudest version of himself.

much less practiced at vigor,

Maria had been carrying him in all of the other ways for half a decade.

Always take blame for your own actions but never take blame for someone else’s.

ultimate in failure. The ultimate imperfection.

This was when the black rose of his darkness had bloomed.

The way he said her name conveyed all of his sympathy, and it confirmed all of the truth of his advice, and it promised her that she was worthwhile and redeemable,

This may seem like a lot to be contained in the single word that is a given name, but this is why in more conservative times, cultures took great care to refer to each other by Mr. and Mrs.

Right then, he was so ferociously proud and scared for Daniel that love and hope and fear choked his Diablo Diablo voice from him.

“It’s just that the rain has stopped.”

Some people said that these butterflies were the souls of the dead returning to earth in time

for Día de Los Muertos, but Luis had thought he had never seen anything so alive.

Miracles are a strange thing in that sometimes a miracle will trigger another one, or sometimes

And finally he was thinking that it wasn’t all bad being a radio giant, as long as you looked for the things you could do as a giant that you couldn’t do as anything else, like hold up someone else’s voice so it was just a little louder.

the branched and peculiar lightning flowers that covered his arm, ending at his fingers.

The lightning had raced down the wires so hot and ferocious that it had lit everything it touched on fire.

love & lightening a tongue of flame, a heart of fire

Anyone who has fought a fire of any size knows that there are some fires you can kill and some fires that will die only on their own.

had never grown warm enough to incubate and hatch but now, finally, in this miraculous, destructive fire, it cracked open. A strange dark owl of a breed none of them had ever seen burst from the fire. It circled around their heads once, and when it looked down, for a moment, its paler face looked like a woman’s—a little like Loyola Soria, and a little like the face of the sculpture in the Shrine.

It is difficult to give up hope, particularly when you have just been filled with a lot of it, particularly when you have gone without for so long. Humans are as drawn to hope as owls are to miracles.

The danger had been real, but the taboo had not.

Now they imagined a generation of pilgrims coming and learning from previous pilgrims and from Sorias and from the indefinable wisdom that comes from music, even if the words don’t always sink in.

Now that the owls and butterflies had dispersed, there was only one species left soaring overhead: vultures.

as very few people are ever healed by being told a truth instead of feeling the truth for themselves.

But Pete was not wrong. He had not been wrong before when he’d said it, and he wasn’t wrong now. If only Beatriz believed her strangely shaped feelings existed, she would have seen it, too. Instead, she found herself impatient with him, thinking about how Francisco and Antonia’s relationship had fallen apart because they were too dissimilar. Pete, she thought, was merely proving how he was an emotional being and unable to see her for how she truly was, unable to understand what she was unable to give him. She believed that this conversation was exactly why people like her father and Beatriz ended up alone in greenhouses with their work.

Antonia had found this impossibly cruel, but Francisco had not left to hurt her. He had left to ease his own mind.

Too much noise and too much anger acted like a flue on his thoughts, and as Antonia’s grief overtook her, his ideas had been choked down to only a tiny flame—and what was he, if not made purely of ideas?

having lived with so much noise for so long, he hungered for absolute silence. It was only after many days of quiet that his prized fluidity of thought had slowly built back up again.

In this way, he lived a small and solitary life in a small and controlled world. It was not his best life. But it was an acceptable one.

There was a long moment of quiet. Because they were both good about being quiet, it is difficult to say just how long this moment actually lasted. It was shorter than the night, but not by a lot.

“I believe that we have been wrong about many things.”

She had not known that she could cry, and she did not know why she was crying, and she did not realize that this in many cases is just how crying goes. She cried for a very long time and then she thought about how she had told Pete she was not upset when she had been the most upset she had ever been in her life. And then she thought about the vultures and Marisita and she cried even more. Finally, she thought of how they had been wrong about the taboo for so long and it was probably going to cost Daniel’s life.

and the girl with strange feelings