Housekeeping

a few beautiful excerpts:

What with the lake and railroads, and what with blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages of ecstacy they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable.

They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time.

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around like what must have seemed like grace. She knew a thousand songs. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starch sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind. Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence. Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.

Sylvie was pretty, but she was prettiest when something had just startled her into feeling that the world had to be dealt with in some way, and then she undertook the most ordinary things with an arch, tense, tentative good will that made them seem difficult and remarkable, and she was delighted by even partial success.

It had always seemed to me that Sylvie and I were together purely as a matter of accident--the wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly.

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderist word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly--My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning.

from Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

There are way too many of these for one post to sink in appropriately but that's just the way it happened.