Gilead (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

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

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.

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

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days,

All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.

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.

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. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike.