"[H]ow nearly the state of grace resembled the state of Idaho." —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

From Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: "There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at table.  But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."

"For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value ....  In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves.  They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned."  —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

"Darkness is the only solvent." —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

"And any present moment was only thinking, and thoughts bear the same relation, in mass and weight, to the darkness they rise from, as reflections do to the water they ride upon, and in the same way they are arbitrary, or merely given." —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

"Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition." —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping