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The first miracle was this: making the darkness visible. Sadness is a little like darkness. They both begin the same way. A tiny, thin pool of uneasiness settles in the bottom of the gut. Sadness simmers fast and boils hard and then billows up and out, filling first the stomach, then heart, then lungs, then legs, then arms, then up into the throat, then pressing against eardrums, then swelling against skull and eventually spilling out of eyes in a hissing release. Darkness, though, grows like a cave formation. Slow drips from the uneasiness harden over the surface of a slick knob of pain. Over
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the truth is that we men and women often hate to be rid of the familiar, and sometimes our darkness is the thing we know the best.
A debate without a goal of philosophical interference can continue endlessly without drama.
Humanity, she maintained, was necessary for darkness to exist. Without an understanding of the concept of darkness, morality, or other existential subjects, the unpleasantness inside the individual could not be darkness but rather simply nature,
“I think the darkness is about shame.”
It is, after all, not the tasks people do but the things they do around the edges of them that reveal who they are.
In an effort to study this feeling objectively, Beatriz imagined it rising out of her mind and up into the air above the telescope, hoping to disentangle the emotion from her untrustworthy body. To her annoyance, however, it refused to float above her. Some feelings are rooted too strongly in the body to exist without it, and this one, desire, is one of them.
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.
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.
In this projected future, she could not tell if she broke Pete Wyatt’s heart merely by being herself. She could not tell if they would be unable to have conversations because they would both want something from the other that was impossible. She could not tell if it was safer to stop a love story before it ever truly got under way.
It was a feeling so sizable and so complicated that it would have been difficult even for someone with emotional practice to express, and for Beatriz, who was handicapped by her belief of not having them, it was impossible.
the intense and heartrending disappointment that came from standing on the edge of something extraordinary and walking away from it.
With some difficulty, Beatriz sorted her thoughts back into their proper places. Love, especially new love, is gifted at disordering them.
She was torn in many directions. The easiest of these directions was away,
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.
He had thought he had lived a happy life, but now he understood that he had only ever been content. This moment was his first moment of true happiness, and now he had to readjust every other expectation in his life to match it.
Have you ever felt like that, listeners, like you only exist in relation to someone else in your life? It’s a terrible feeling. People are like sweet, sweet chords—we love them when they’re playing all together nicely, like in the pretty number I’m going to spin next, but it would be a crying shame to forget what a lovely little noise a D major makes strummed on a single guitar.”
very few people are ever healed by being told a truth instead of feeling the truth for themselves.
She did not like the conclusion she had come to, which is how she knew it was free of her personal bias.
The lesson Daniel was meant to learn was that miracles were made to be interfered with. He was never supposed to be able to banish this darkness alone. His darkness was a puzzle that was meant to be solvable only by another Saint.
She mused on how the Sorias’ real collective darkness was that they would not let themselves help others because they were too afraid of losing themselves, that they were so afraid of being open and true about their own fears and darkness that they put it in a box and refused to even accept that they, too, might need healing.
