Marilynne Robinson Gilead Quotes & Sayings

There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth even if no one remembers it. To look at the lace, it's just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now. But what must Galilee have looks like? You can't tell so much from the appearance of a place. — Marilynne Robinson

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. — Marilynne Robinson

My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine. — Marilynne Robinson

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 this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any. — Marilynne Robinson

Gilead was the kind of town where dogs slept in the road for the sun and the warmth that lingered after the sun was gone, and the few cars that there were had to stop and honk until the dogs decided to get up and let them pass by. They'd go limping off to the side, lamed by the comfort they'd had to give up, and then they'd settle down again right where they were before. It really wasn't much of a town. — Marilynne Robinson

What book(s) changed your life and why? I could probably list books for days, so I'll just list a few favorites: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate, 1984 by George Orwell, the Bible, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Juliet by Andras Visky (which is a play, but I think it still counts). — Veronica Roth