Gilead (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing.

I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He was afraid it wouldn’t come to him, and then he’d have to find another kind of life, and he couldn’t really think of one. We’d go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren’t many.

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.

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.

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.

My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.

In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.

He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be living at a dead run.

My father always said when someone dies the body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn’t want anymore.