Gilead (Gilead #1)

by Marilynne Robinson

It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed—when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

But I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company.

There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them.

I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.

My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it.

I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

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

So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

Children seem to think every pleasant thing has to be a surprise.

There are the Ten Commandments, of course, and I know you will have been particularly aware of the Fifth Commandment, Honor your father and your mother. I draw attention to it because Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine are enforced by the criminal and civil laws and by social custom. The Tenth Commandment is unenforceable, even by oneself, even with the best will in the world, and it is violated constantly.

I think it is significant that the Fifth Commandment falls between those that have to do with proper worship of God and those that have to do with right conduct toward other people. I have always wondered if the Commandments should be read as occurring in order of importance.

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

To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does.

Feuerbach doesn’t imagine the possibility of an existence beyond this one, by which I mean a reality embracing this one but exceeding it, the way, for example, this world embraces and exceeds Soapy’s understanding of it. Soapy might be a victim of ideological conflict right along with the rest of us, if things get out of hand. She would no doubt make some feline appraisal of the situation, which would have nothing to do with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Manhattan Project. The inadequacy of her concepts would have nothing to do with the reality of the situation.

I thought of apologizing, but that would only confirm in his mind that my meaning and my intention were what he took them to be, which I do not wholly believe, and which would deprive him of the possibility of making a less damaging interpretation of them.

In fact, I had spent the morning darkness praying for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton, and then when he woke me, I was immediately aware that my sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines for the sake of a few more minutes’ sleep.

“When I was young I thought a settled life was what happened to you if you weren’t careful.”

I had never felt before that everything I thought I was amounted to the clothes on my back and the books on my shelves and the calendar I kept full of obligations waiting and obligations fulfilled.

I told them, If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.

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

If a few people did make remarks, I just forgave them so fast it was as if I never heard them, because it was wrong of them to judge and I knew it and they should have known it.

The word “preacher” comes from an old French word, prédicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways.

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