and the hours after that

“Glory sat down on the porch steps. She thought, If Jack had been here, he’d have felt that terrible shock of joy—no, worse than joy, peace—that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling—humiliating as she remembered it, because she had been so helpless against it.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She went to the porch to watch him walk away down the road. He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“It seemed to her there was a peacefulness about him that came with resignation, with the extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible, the unrealized, the yet to be determined.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“There are very few comforts to be had from half-confiding… .”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She said, ‘This is a nightmare I’ve had a hundred times. The one where all the rest of you go off and begin your lives and I am left in an empty house full of ridiculous furniture and unreadable books, waiting for someone to notice I’m missing and come back for me. And nobody does.’

He laughed. ‘Poor Pigtails.’ Then he said, ‘When I have that dream, I’m hiding in the barn hoping someone will find me, and nobody does.’”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect.”

— Reverend Robert Boughton in Home by Marilynne Robinson

“He said, ‘Reverend Miles, Della’s father and my biographer, told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing.’ He looked at her. ‘Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe.’ He said, ‘It’s why I keep to myself. When I can. Ah. And now the tears.’

‘Don’t you think everybody feels that way sometimes, though? I certainly have. While you had Della you didn’t feel that way. If you weren’t alone so much, I mean, Papa’s right about that. If you’d just let us help you.’”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You can hate thoughts. That’s interesting. I hate most of my thoughts.”

— Jack Boughton in Home by Marilynne Robinson

“Jack had run a length of clothesline from beam to beam and thrown a tarp over it to make a low tent in the angle of floor and roof. She knelt and looked into it. The edges were neatly nailed down. There was a floor of newspapers, a rumpled blanket and a pillow. He had set a wooden box on its side as a table and shelf. A flashlight, a few books, a mayonnaise jar with a handful of her oatmeal cookies in it. The framed photograph of a river. A glass and an uncapped pint bottle, three-quarters empty. The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about it like a dark spirit lurking in it, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh. She thought, What if he had succeeded in dying, and then she had found this, so neatly and intentionally made out of nothing anyone could want, with the fierce breath of his grief still haunting it, the blanket still tangled.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“[H]ere is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father’s hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.

She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Strangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her. Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Maybe getting what you deserve is the saddest thing in the world.”

— Glory Boughton in Home by Marilynne Robinson

“‘I’ve thought about this place so many times. When I was a kid I used to wish I lived here. I used to wish I could just walk in the door like the rest of you did and, you know, sit down at the table and do my homework or something.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘I actually tried it out once or twice.’ Then he said, ‘I know why people watched me. I’m not even sure that was what made me uneasy. I think it made me feel safer sometimes. I used to test it, stir up a little trouble to make sure the old fellow was still keeping an eye on me. Sometimes I’d be out in the barn, in the loft, listening to the piano, you all singing “My Darling Clementine,” and I’d think, Maybe they’ve forgotten all about me, and it felt like death, in a way.’ He said, ‘I was usually closer to home than he thought I was. Where he didn’t look for me.’ He glanced at her. ‘Don’t cry, please. I’m just telling you how it was.’ He laughed. ‘How it is.’”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home