Gilead (Gilead #1)

by Marilynne Robinson

amazing. I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true.

He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes.

That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness.

I think sometimes there might be an advantage in making people aware how worn and stale these old transgressions are.

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? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances

Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery.

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. It gave me a sort of turn there for a while.

How you would honor someone differs with circumstances, so you can only truly fulfill a general obligation to show honor in specific cases of mutual intimacy and understanding.

that it is the consistent example of parents in the Bible that they honor their children.

is not Adam but the Lord who rebukes Cain. Eli never rebukes his sons, or Samuel his. David never rebukes Absalom. At the very end, poor old Jacob rebukes his sons as he...

You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us.

As for the child honoring the parent, I believe that had to be commanded because the parent is a greater mystery,

Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father,

the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. In

And I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.

Nevertheless, I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst.

when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not

But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform. Now, I

dishonor is recalcitrant.

I shaved carefully and put on a white shirt and buffed my shoes a little, and so on. I think such preparations can be the difference between an elderly gentleman and a codger.

the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.

Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.

We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for.

That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.

And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those

handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. That is a thing I would love to see.

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

The expectation of death I began with reads like a kind of youthfulness, it seems to me now.

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. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.