Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.

Edward

I still wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I should have said! or That’s what he meant!

Gilead.

I always felt there was a metaphor in that. The waters never parted for him, not once in his life, so far as I know.

old like I am, but then your mother isn’t young like the girl in the book is, either.

I believe I have made some progress on that front through prayer, though there is clearly much more progress to be made, much more praying to be done.

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 that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself.

There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world.

faith. 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.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect.

I hate to think what I would give for a thousand mornings like this. For two or three. You were wearing your red shirt and your mother was wearing her blue dress.

It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness, but because God their Father loves them.