Maryilynne Robinson의 'Gilead' 중

I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days, and people respected me for all those hours I was up here working away in the study, and for the books that used to come in the mail for me - not so many, really, but more than I could afford. That's where some of the money went that I could have put aside.

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point.
It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience.

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.

I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a raio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

I knew perfectly well at that time, as I had for years and years that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him.

- Let aside the part related to the religion, this book shows me what being 'decent' in one's whole life means.