The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse Quotes
"Father Damien’s best hours were late at night and just after rising, when all he’d had to break his fast was a cup of hot water."
"His thoughts seemed to penetrate sheer air, the maze of tree branches waving above the stones, clouds, sky, even time itself."
"His habit was then to doze again, often straight into his afternoon nap."
"When lucid again, Father Damien repaired for the evening to his desk, a place from which he refused to be disturbed."
"Father Damien drank a few drops of wine, and usually, by the time he was ready for bed, he was what he called 'pacified.'"
"A desperate gravity has hold of me these days."
"I speak to you from a terrible distance. I have so much to tell you, and so little time."
"Dare I hope, since this will be the last of my reports, that at long last you will see fit to answer?"
"Father Damien enjoyed hearing sins, chewing over people’s stories, and then with a flourish absolving and erasing their wrongs, sending sinners out of the church clean and new."
"Even so, he still excelled at listening to confessions."
"Father Damien’s mind relaxed. His habit was then to doze again, often straight into his afternoon nap."
"Sir, why this pretense? You are not a priest!"
"Exactly, Miss DeWitt thought, like a flock of blank-eyed sheep."
"Come after me and I will blow her head off, Mister Sheriff."
"And it was as though they were engaged in some sort of dance as they walked out the door."
"When one enters into the presence of such music, one should be naked."
"Some people grieve by holding fast to the love of others, some by rejecting all companionship."
"Creation had spoken to her in ways she could encompass—in the splendor of sexual love, the grand Dakota sky, the arcane language of cramped, black musical notes."
"I have willingly exchanged my prospects for eternal joy in return for the salvation of the soul of one of the more troublesome of my charges."
"In resolving a specific injustice levied by the ignorance of government officials, I have assisted in attempting to add twelve townships to the tribal land base."
"I have discovered an unlikely truth that may interest Your Holiness. The ordinary as well as esoteric forms of worship engaged in by the Ojibwe are sound, even compatible with the teachings of Christ."
"I have sought no following, engaged in no behaviors, holy or otherwise, that would bring me notoriety. I have done only as I was directed by Jesus, with whom I have a personal understanding."
"Our incense is God’s own breath—the wind through these rough walls!"
"The space around the wagon, boundless and gray, serene and cold, changed only subtly as they passed through on the nearly invisible road."
"It was the silence of before creation, the comfort of pure nothing, and she let herself go into it until, in that quiet, she was caught hold of by a dazzling sweetness."
"I prayed for a priest just like you, young, with a tough, fresh faith!"
"It was a place of shifting allegiances, new feuds and old animosities, a place of clan teasing, jealousy, comfort, and love."
"Many did sell for one simple reason. Hunger."
"Into this complex situation walked Father Damien, with only the vaguest notion of how the ownership of land related to the soul."
"Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien."
"Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception?"
"Now and then Agnes recalled a tiny portion of her encounter with the Actor, and she came to understand it as a sure prefigurement and sign of what was to come."
"She wrapped her blistered and frost-burned feet in several layers of the nun’s dish towels, pulled on her boots, then she took from Sister Hildegarde the scratchings of a map."
"Her trek began on a road of packed ice that turned to snow that turned to unpacked snow that turned to nothing."
"At the time, she still possessed an untested belief that, having survived the robbery, the chase, the bullets, and the flood, then transformed herself to Father Damien, she could not be harmed."
"What occupied Agnes was the misery of concealing the exasperating monthly flow that belonged to her past but persisted into the present."
"She shivered with shock and a lost sensation gathered, swept through her, and was gone with a shimmer of musical notes."
"In that cessation, Agnes DeWitt was flooded with uneasy agitation."
"They were shells made of loss, made of transparent flint, made of the whispers in the oak leaves, voices of the dead."
"The priests had brought the sickness long ago in the hems of their black gowns, in their sleeves, in the water they flung on people to make them holy but which might as well have burned holes in their skin."
"The air was cold and bubbled in her blood like sleep."
"They ate every little scrap. They ate the toes, they ate the brains. Sucked every bone completely clean."
"As the evening went on, they all came to see it her way."
"My reasons are no better or worse than those of Nanapush."
"Why do the chimookomanag want us? They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg."
"A man’s heart was generous, giving, like a skin that could hold more and more water. But there was always a limit, the last drop, a sorrow that could burst it."
"Lazarres and Pillagers should eat from the same kettle, join together for strength against the truer threat."
"God had brought her there under false pretenses, after all, aiding her with huge compassion in the flood’s aftermath, appearing in person as a man with a horn spoon, calm hands."
"Although her heart was charred black, Agnes felt a fresh stab of desperation and threw herself against the disease."
"The ugliness of death brought out of her an angel."
"Agnes dreaded reaching a cabin with no smoke, for it would usually be inhabited by a council of the dead."
"There was an end to it, as there was an end to everything."
"An amazed strength flowed into Agnes’s legs and she stumbled through the snow, reaching."
"Father Jude, each name you hear on this reservation is an unfinished history. A destiny that opens like a cone pouring out a person’s life."
"Father Damien, if you don’t mind my asking, have you got a twin?"
"Our Leopolda spent some time cared for by her sisters, I am told. Apparently, she experienced what we would call a nervous breakdown, fell into the grip of hallucinations."
"The difference being very difficult, almost impossible, to discern in a person unstable and gripped by false visions as she was."
"I am sure that a number of mystics would have benefited from a regimen of antidepressants. However, we would all be the poorer."
"Many a time I pitied her, but Father Jude, I was hard pressed not to hate her as well."
"When it is to his advantage. That was the nature of Leopolda’s kindness. I consider that a spurious kindness."
"But that is just exactly what the Puyats are, not one thing or the other. Contradictory."
"Comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears."
"Only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood held a vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet."
"He was now in charge of history, which suited him just fine, and he was only a boy."
"In the long drinking gaze that grew between them, Agnes experienced a protective adoration that shook her to the bone."
"Collateral wasn't birch-bark baskets or buckets of just picked berries... Collateral was land."
"What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation."
"Nothing can go anywhere. Nothing can do things. People don’t see nothing, but nothing sees them."
"He was thrilled and touched with sadness, he was hungry, and he was practical. He was lonely; he was a priest."
"The intimacy and the special favor shown her in the very beginning, at the river, at the first communion she’d performed, was withdrawn."
"To her relief, Father Gregory did not pursue their histories except as a polite gesture."
"He was much more interested in the present, and in learning from Father Damien all that he could before taking up a reservation post."
"She had already split the ash and now she showed him how to heat it and bend it into a circle."
"Some people eat this," she told Gregory. "It’s like salad with a dressing of moose digestive juices."
"No!" she roughly said, grasping the new priest’s wrists to help him bend the wood properly."
"The heat from the overfed stove rose in her cheeks."
"I believe we’d worry Sister Hildegarde," was Damien’s answer."
"For a while she slept, but then, waking in the dark, a fury of discomfort seized Agnes."
"Her desire was one with a kind regard that felt both sinless and irresistible."
"I belong to you," said Gregory to Agnes. "I love you."
"What is it when you know of a sin and do nothing?"
"Then I must confess it," said the woman unwillingly."
"Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she was nerveless, bereft."
"The wages are eternal punishment," said Agnes.
"If we are cut off from God by sinning," he said, low, "why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud?"
"She couldn’t shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove."
"He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled."
"Have you any spiritual anodyne or comfort, any small practice that might assist in my travail?"
"Agnes tried to slide the pain off her body like the husk of a spent and sleeping lover."
"Huge jagged rips of sound tore out of her but the pain was not impressed."
"For if Damien had dreamed himself much farther into that overgrown country how could he ever have returned?"
"She stood to one side of the altar. As soon as the sides of the new church were framed and the roof on tight, the Superior wanted to test the acoustics."
"The sound reverberated. With a soft and, she feared, insane longing, her hands crept forward again."
"Time passed, or no time passed. Absorbed in the rush of knowing, Agnes felt eyes watching."
"The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door."
"Time is a fish, and all of us are living on the rib of its fin."
"With the stolen money, Agnes also purchased, from an eastern parish, a chalice of fine gold, a ciborium, a platen, an embroidered burse studded with semiprecious stones, and two cruets of fine crystal."
"Every so often, as though for His awful amusement, we are overturned."
"Sacrifice had been his rule. He’d put others above himself and lived in the abyss of doubt rather than forsake those in need."
"Was doubt when coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith?"