All the Crooked Saints Quotes

“I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“It is, after all, not the tasks people do but the things they do around the edges of them that reveal who they are.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Do you have darkness inside you?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“And do you want to be rid of it?”
This is a harder question to answer than one might think at first blush. Almost no one would think it’s correct to answer this question with a no, but 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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“The conception of perfection exists only so we have something to strive toward. Impossibility is built into it, which is why we call it perfect instead of extremely good.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Humans are as drawn to hope as owls are to miracles. It only takes the suggestion of it to stir them up, and the eagerness lingers for a while even when all traces of it are gone.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Maybe if you want things to change, you should start in yourself.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“What a shame that both miracles and radio waves are invisible, because ti would be quite a sight: ribbons of marvel and sound stretching out straight and true from all over the world.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Pete fell deeply in love with it.
This strange cold desert does not care if you live or die in it, but he fell for it anyway. He had not known before then that a place could feel so raw and so close to the surface. His weak heart felt the danger but could not resist.
He fell in love so fiercely that the desert itself noticed.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Even a small voice is still a voice.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“This is the way of our work: We cannot help but color it with the paint of our feelings, both good and bad.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“You can hear a miracle a long way after dark.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Pete’s eyes followed not the vehicle as it trundled forward but instead the varied and complicated horizon of the desert. The very last of the sun played over it and every stalk of grass dripped with honeyed light. His back ached and his arms were pebbled with goose bumps, but as he savored the view and sucked in big, juniper-scented breaths, he was still besotted.
The desert, which was not given to sympathy or sentiment, was nonetheless moved, and for the first time in a long time, it loved someone back.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“None of us are really alone as long as we're lonely.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Lightning and love are created in very similar ways. There is some debate over how both lightning and love form, but most experts agree that both require the presence of complementary opposites. A towering thundercloud is full of opposites: ice and positive charge at its uppermost point, water and negative change at its base. In electricity and in love, opposites attract, and so as these opposites begin to interact, an electrical field develops. In a cloud, this field eventually grows so powerful that it must burst from the cloud in the form of lightning, visible from miles away. It is essentially the same in a love affair.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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, and it indicated that he treasured the way he had seen her selflessly interact with the other pilgrims, and it hinted that if any single thing was different about their circumstances, he would marry her immediately and live with her for decades until they died on the same day just as in love as they were in that moment. 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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Here was a thing Beatriz wanted: to devote time to understanding how a butterfly was similar to a galaxy. Here was a thing she feared: being asked to do anything else.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Sadness is a little like darkness. They both begin the same way.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“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.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“She was so mean that she even killed her own name, and now people just pointed to her.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Here was a thing he wanted: for singers to pause in their singing to laugh during a verse. Here was a thing he feared: cats lying on his face and smothering him while he slept.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“One can never tell what will make one person happy and leave another untouched. Often even the person involved will be surprised by what makes them happy.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Love in the high desert is a strange thing. There is something about the climate—the remoteness, the severity of the seasons, the dryness of the air, the extreme beauty—that makes people feel more deeply. Perhaps without trees or cities to dampen the enormity of the feelings, they spread out hugely. Perhaps the hard-packed dust of the San Luis Valley amplifies them, like a shout into a canyon.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Here was a thing he feared: that this strange feeling in his heart-this palpably growing emptiness- would eventually kill him”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints