This is a delicate, almost feminine book that I really really enjoyed but it's a book I wouldn't recommend loosely (I recommended it to my dad and he had no interest). It's very religious and it's very philosophical. That said the writing is incredible, the formatting is original and at moments it's intensely suspenseful. It's also extremely moving.
I read it months and months ago and had not thought about it for sometime until I bumped into a quote page by a guy named Ryan Holiday (www.ryanholiday.net) and saw that he had pulled a few quotes from the book and written them down. These are his selections, not mine, but they give you a sense for the writing. The first quote is incredible.
"In every important way we are secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of a number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live."
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead
I think they must also be a preeminent courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that previous things have been put in our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
Robinson, Marilynne
Gilead
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