The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

He learned Spanish, which is to say that he stubbornly decided that he could already speak Spanish, and that people could already understand him.

For the sake of science and national security, by God, the British Empire needed balloons.

This was not a considered decision. Nor was it a gesture of charity, draped in a warm mantle of maternal kindness. No, this was an act of intuition, sprung from a deep and unspoken feminine knowledge of how the world functions.

Prudence excited envy in women, but it was not clear that she excited passion in men. Prudence had a way of making men feel that they ought not to bother at all, and so, wisely, they didn’t.

“I am Retta Snow, madam, and I am your newest and most undeviating friend.” “Well, Retta Snow,” said Prudence, “I believe you might be undeviatingly mad.”

“Well, Miss Snow,” he began awkwardly. “They are among our least sophisticated plants—” “But that is an unkind thing to say, sir!” “—and they are autotrophic.” “How proud their parents must be of them!” “Well . . . er,” George stuttered. By now, he was out of words.

Firstly, Alma had determined, there was such a thing as Human Time, which was a narrative of limited, mortal memory, based upon the flawed recollections of recorded history. Human Time was a short and horizontal mechanism. It stretched out straight and narrow, from the fairly recent past to the barely imaginable future.

Wifehood, as it turned out, did not suit Mrs. Retta Snow Hawkes. She simply was not crafted for it.

“Will you still love me and will you still be kind to me,” Retta would ask Alma in the middle of the night, “if I become the very devil himself?” “I will always love you,” Alma reassured the only friend she had ever had.

One could not set one’s hand to eliminating every known injustice while at the same time writing definitive books on American mosses

“Why are you not a minister, in that case?” “My mother wonders the same thing, Mr. Whittaker. I am afraid I have too many questions about religion to be a good minister.” “Religion?” Henry frowned. “What the deuce does religion have to do with being a good minister? It is a profession like any other profession, young man. You fit yourself to the task, and keep your opinions private. That is what all good ministers do—or should!”

I would enjoy to see your translation of the Holy Scripture: ‘Consider the lilies of the field; they neither toil nor spin—though most probably they were not lilies, in any case, but rather Anemone coronaria, though we cannot be certain, but regardless, we can all agree that they neither toil nor spin.’ What a hymn that would make, to fill the rafters of any church!

“Father suggested that I speak with you for guidance on the subject of delighting a husband.” One of Prudence’s eyebrows lifted, minutely. “I am sorry to hear that he thinks me an authority,” she said.

Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield.

He was not being impolite; he was simply Dutch,

Alma knew that her paper ran the risk of making her look reckless, arrogant, naive, anarchistic, degenerate, and even a tiny bit French.

“I believe that we are half-blind and full of errors. I believe that we understand very little, and what we do understand is mostly wrong. I believe that life cannot be survived—that is evident!—but if one is lucky, life can be endured for quite a long while. If one is both lucky and stubborn, life can sometimes even be enjoyed.”