Jack (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

Then he thanked the Lord for the eye of the beholder, that perjured witness.

Miracles leave no trace. He had decided, hearing his father preach on the subject, that they happened once as a sort of commentary on the blandness and inadequacy of the reality they break in on, and then vanish, leaving a world behind that refutes the very idea that such a thing could have happened.

“I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say ‘beautiful’ about things no one else would ever see. The precious things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it. I hope that doesn’t sound harsh.”

The whole congregation would have understood when he said good manners were an excellent beginning, a kind of discipline that could lead to actual virtue, given time.

The knowledge of good. That half of the primal catastrophe received too little attention. Guilt and grace met together in the phrase despite all that. He could think of himself as a thief sneaking off with an inestimable wealth of meaning and trust, all of it offended and damaged beyond use, except to remind him of the nature of the crime. Or he co

“I’m a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.”

He did buy a sketch pad and some pencils, thinking he would try to draw her face from memory and expecting to fail at it. Memory would be less engrossing if it were more sufficient.

“I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don’t do that. In your own way, you’re kind of—pure.”

Cleverness has a special piquancy when it blooms out of the fraying sleeve of failure.