Gilead (Gilead #1)

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.

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

“Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire”—that’s the truth.

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

In a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however, that they buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it.

I wish I had kept it, because I meant every word. It might have been the only sermon I wouldn’t mind answering for in the next world. And I burned it. But Mirabelle Mercer was not Pontius Pilate, and she was not Woodrow Wilson, either.

A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so 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. That is a remarkable thing to consider.

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

You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

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

Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.

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?

So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.