There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 245)

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

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 243)

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

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 209)

"There is that scattereth, and increaseth yet more, and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want."

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 198)

"For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?" In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a serparate language in each of us, also a serparate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful an what is acceptable--which I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

The thoughtlessness of any individual, when it is seen to be in service to the mindfulness of the Lord, cannot justify anger.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 194)

There are two insidious nothions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt ther eare more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 145)

How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 142)

I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it's fair to say that...I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. This does not meant hat it is ever right to cause suffering or to seek it out when it can be avoided, and serves no good, practicle purpose. To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange, so I want to be very clear about this. It means simply that God takes the side of sufferers against thos who afflict them.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 137)

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?...each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists ofour behavior, and the reaction of God to usm ight be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgemental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? Which how much assurance do we perform it?

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 124)

That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wildnerness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to bear this in mind.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 119)

I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge," because many people are tender of hteir resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 117)

The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe...It all means more than I can tell you, so you must not judge what I know by what I find words for....I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 114)

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean the most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 102)

I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 73)

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize ther eis nothing more astonishing than a human face...It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But his is the truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 66)

One lapse of judgement can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 60)

As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial...and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting hte pavement so hard they'd fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such enegy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 56-57)

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 yeilds the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (pg. 45)

It seemes to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so."