All the Crooked Saints

It was often so easy to identify the darkness from the outside. But from the inside, your darkness was indistinguishable from your other thoughts.

This did not, as you might imagine, make Pete feel any better, as very few people are ever healed by being told a truth instead of feeling the truth for themselves.

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.

Francisco often mused about the scientific points of the miracle, but to Antonia, this was not only blasphemy but dangerous blasphemy. To treat it as something contained by logic was to get comfortable around it, which not only made such a thing more dangerous but also made it less holy and thus less important. Antonia’s kind of belief is not uncommon, but it has done both science and religion a disservice. 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

In this light he looked less like a human you would meet and more like a thing that you would discover.