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Love the way it opens: "Without hope there would be no magic."

I love the way he describes memory and how it plays tricks on us and the way smell is so firmly attached to memory.

"He said it meant that when you did a good thing it should seem to come from God, not from you. It should not feel to other people like your goodness, and it should not feel that way to you, either. Any good thing is less good the more any human being lays claim to it."

On the one hand, Lila is sad and unwanted; on the other hand, Doll loves her unconditionally, so she does have a glimpse of the possibility of love.

End of Part One. Have a good feel for the main characters and find the story rather captivating, despite the fact that nothing has really happened of any true significance so far.

So easy to just get lost in this book. It has probably been 40+ years since the last time I read it. I've watched the movie several times since then. I cannot separate the two in my head...when Atticus speaks he always has Gregory Peck's voice for me.

I had forgotten how much I love the perfect prose of Harper Lee.
"Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."
Maybe those who have never lived without air conditioning will not experience this line as I did...but I remember those sweltering summer days of my childhood.

Then she said, "what is a soul?"
He looked up, smiled, studied her face. "Why ask me?"
"It just seems to me that you would know."
He shrugged. "On the basis of my vast learning and experience, I would say--it is what you can't get rid of. Insult, deprivation, outright violence--'If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there,' and so on.

Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him.

"Sometimes I'd be out in the barn, in the loft, listening to the piano, you all singing "My Darling Clementine, and I'd think, Maybe they've forgotten all about me, and it felt like death, in a way." He said, "I was usually closer to home than he thought I was. Where he didn't look for me."

The discussion of predestination is amazing. It is so difficult to address such a difficult and mysterious issue from so many points of view and not miss any possible arguments on either side. This is what I feel Robinson has done.

Bravo for Lila, who answers the real question so softly and so accurately.
"Then she looked up at him and said, 'A person can change. Everything can change."

After Ames has delivered the sermon aimed at Jack, there is a feeling of a rift between him and Boughton. When we have a friend like this, in whom we have confided everything, and then they do something that feels so against us, so against what we wanted or needed, it has the impact of more than a hammer blow.

Of course, we who have read Gilead understand more about this than Boughton does.

I love Jack's prayer. It says so much about his state of mind.

"You are patient and gracious far beyond our deserving. You let us hope for your forgiveness when we can find no way to forgive ourselves. You bless our lives even when we have shown ourselves to be utterly ungrateful and unworthy. May we be strengthened and renewed, to make us less unworthy of blessing, through these your gifts of sustenance..."

Her father had always said, God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.

After a moment he said, "It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them. That's where the problem lies. In my case."

It is sadder- I think - to know the truths and be unable to believe them than not to know of them at all.

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 has two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain, protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment

At that point she lost her temper. She thought, Why am I apologizing to this man for something I did not say, and also for what I did say, which was only the truth?

Oh goodness, how many times have I been here. Apologizing when it was not my thought in the first place only what the other person attributed to me.

For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ.

Just as moving and emotional the second time around.

"There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding."

"If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace."

Goodness this has a terrifying element to it. Not exactly horror but very gripping.

I am very, very glad that Dickens is back in England where he belongs.

End of Part One. Oh goodness what a slog the last 60 pages were. All political lecture, no real plot advancement. I'm sure he feels he must lay all the groundwork for the "why" of this senseless war, but he does it by having the characters expound to one another endlessly on their point of view and which philosophers support them. It is downright painful.