John Harwood

“I remember her, grave with the peace of the destined, the summoned, and she seemed almost an apparition.
But if she had simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way. Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous. Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward because she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“She had followed her father’s thoughts back to that old bitterness, and the bitterness simmered in his half-closed eyes as he reflected on the inevitability of his disappointment.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“I no longer call you servants,…I have called you friends.”14 Servants is a “doing” word; friends is a “being” word. What do servants do? They cook, clean, et cetera. A friend, however, is something you are, not something you do. A servant is Martha, a friend is Mary.”
― Gary L. Thomas, Sacred Pathways: Discover Your Soul's Path to God

“Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn’t such a villain after all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home