Fear is a vice that takes root once it is cultivated. It takes time to recover from it. Jean Luze shrugged. "Who can boast that he has never been afr… - Marie Vieux-Chauvet

It did not escape me that for some time now I'd been faking piety. I had lost my faith when I saw the children's bodies piled high before my eyes after the last hurricane. Many of the oldest and meanest had been spared. Why? was the first unanswered question that gave me the courage to make my point. How many of these women kneeling to receive the body and blood of our Lord had never helped their fellow man? I asked myself that Sunday. All those around me were great sinners-usurers, exploiters, sadists, corrupters of virtue. I had known them from tender childhood. Not a soul you could praise to the skies. (p18)

What a hymn to life, this work born from suffering! (p31)

When she came out, pure and beautiful in her immaculate smock, all that weighed on his heart seemed to melt. She exists, you simply have to remind yourself that such women exist in order to reconcile yourself with life, he told himself. (Chapter 10)