Avenue of Mysteries

Не все коллизии оборачиваются сюрпризом.

Now there was no chance to leave Lithuania. Now there was no light—there was only the unlit darkness. That was what Dorothy had called the view from the plane of Manila Bay, when you were approaching Manila at night: an unlit darkness. “Except for the occasional ship,” she’d told him. “The darkness is Manila Bay,” Dorothy had explained. Not this time, Juan Diego knew—not this darkness. There were no lights, no ships—this unlit darkness was not Manila Bay.

If Lupe were alive, she would have told Juan Diego that this crying statue wasn’t the major miracle in his life. “We’re the miraculous ones,” Lupe had told him. And wasn’t Lupe herself the major miracle? What she had known, what she had risked—how she had willed another future for him! These mysteries were what Juan Diego was part of. Next to these mysteries, his other experiences paled.

Читатели-женщины не дают литературе умереть.

«В жизни каждого наступает момент, когда ты должен больше ни за что не держаться.»

Между неисполнимыми правилами вашей Церкви и требованиями человеческой природы я выбираю человеческую природу

За каждым путешествием стоит своя причина, подумал он, прежде чем осознал, что эта мысль у него уже записана.

Not every collision course comes as a surprise.

It was what he was truly good at—just imagining. Juan Diego knew then that he was dying—the dying wasn’t imaginary. And he realized that this, exactly this, was what people did when they died; this was what people wanted when they passed away—well, it was what Juan Diego wanted, anyway. Not necessarily the life everlasting, not a so-called life after death, but the actual life he wished he’d had—the hero’s life he once imagined for himself.

The world he’d imagined had brought him more satisfaction and less pain than the real world ever had.