Sister, why do you do that?'Do what?'Cage the animals at night?'Well...' She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me.'We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them.'But if somebody loved one them,' I asked, 'wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?'Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow.' She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. 'But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together.

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!'That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun.

When Annunziata said she loved me or any of her thousands of other friends and beloveds, she was really saying, at least in my mind, “God loves you.” To quote the singer/songwriter James Taylor, she showered the people she loved with love, always showing the way that she felt without holding back. Even as her body could barely contain her soul any longer, she'd open wide the gates of herself with a smile, that giggle, her twinkling eyes, and she'd let the supernatural love flow through her. Walking out of the chapel after her funeral, a woman I'd never seen before stopped me and said, “You're Cathleen, aren't you?” “Yes,” I croaked, tears rolling off my nose as I fingered the prayer card with Annunziata's picture on it. Slipping an arm around my shoulders, the woman explained that she was one of Annunziata's former students and said, “She loved you so much.” I know.

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, 'no, certainly not!' but I said, 'ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to,' and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, 'of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water.'When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like 'this is a very handsome man' and 'you must have been proud of your brother' when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and 'you're lucky you have another brother'; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, 'Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!

The black of the ocean waves was the color of the sorrow in my breast, a sorrow that was never far away and always visible.

She thought she should take a moment to pray. But, as she was holding a loaded rifle, conventional prayer did not seem entirely suitable. Sister Peg hoped that God would help her, but it was her belief that He much preferred for people to attend to themselves. Life was a test; it was up to you to pass it or not. She raised the gun to her clavicle and angled one eye down the length of the barrel.

Is this your boyfriend?' the first nun asked. Clair Olivia looked me up and down. “No. This is my gay friend who decided he was straight and single-handedly wrecked havoc at an all-boys school in Massachusetts this fall. He’s gay again and home for Christmas, so yay!

For those he has ignored, he allows them this. He allows them God, their only ally. Places to worship, but no one to teach.

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal.

What happened when the Verb asked the noun to conjugate? She said 'no-no!', forgot the 'o' and decided to become a nun!