"Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead: A Novel)

"In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a seperate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead: A Novel)

"I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)