Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

father always said when someone dies the body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn’t want anymore.

For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.

Once, we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymous lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them.

‘When we were young, marriage meant something. Family meant something. Things weren’t at all the way they are today!’

when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company.

have no doubt. I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.

are there even to the most private thought - the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord.

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.

Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

These old saints bless us every chance they get.

It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.

believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the

My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience.

Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence.

Or it seems like poetry within language.

When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience.

When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and

many of the attacks on belief that have had such prestige for the last century or two are in fact meaningless.

‘Generally, a person’s behavior is consistent with his nature. Which is only to say his behavior is consistent.

Nevertheless, I would advise you against defensiveness on principle.

As I have said, the worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we

are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

Glory said when she asked her brother if he planned to marry the girl he just said, ‘You’ve seen her.’

This morning I woke early, which is really a way of saying last night I hardly slept at all.

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it,

Existence is the essential thing and the holy thing. If the Lord chooses to make nothing of our transgressions, then they are nothing.

And the fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done.

And why do I worry so much over this Jack Boughton? Love is holy because it is like grace - the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him,

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it,

It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.

I saw in young Boughton’s face, as we walked along, a sense of irony at having invested hope in this sad old place, and also the cost to him of relinquishing it. And I knew what hope it was.

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.