More quotes by Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
"You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
"I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things."
"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."
"I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books."