Straße der Wunder

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.

Time can be compressed in dreams.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

The chain of events, the links in our lives—what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do—all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.

"Treading water, a little dog-paddling—it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground—you’re hanging out in familiar territory."

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Неужели все американцы восклицают по поводу очевидного?

«There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands—with both hands.»

"In every life, I think there’s always a moment when you must decide where you belong. At that moment, you’re in no one’s hands,” Dolores had said to Juan Diego. “At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net,” The Wonder herself had told him. “There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go."

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones—the ones who are gone—you can’t stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind—in your dreams, in your memories—sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.

...the way the world worked was "somewhere in between coincidence and fate".