Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what… - Marilynne Robinson

I can imagine Jesus befriending my grandfather, too, frying up some breakfast for him, talking things over with him, and in fact the old man did report several experiences of just that kind.

This document explained my aunt Molly’s departure to my whole satisfaction. Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.

…People are complex — that’s the whole center of interest. I don’t make my characters complex. I have a feeling that I know a character, and one of the aspects of that is knowing that they are complex. I never have the feeling of putting a character together from a selection of qualities.