Some sentences, from Marilynne Robinson, in Housekeeping:
(Sylvie) glanced up sometimes at the snow, which was the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.
The water was so calm that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above the water.
"Look at this," Sylvie said, spreading the paper in her lap. "There's an article here about a woman in Oklahoma who lost an arm in an aircraft factory, but who still manages to support six children by giving piano lessons." Silvie's interest in this article struck me as generous.
For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are a like as a thing and its shadow...and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole....So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.
Lot's wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back. But here rare flowers would gleam in her hair, and on her breast, and in her hands, and there would be children all around her, to love and marvel at her for her beauty, and to laugh at her extravagant adornments, as if they had set the flowers in her hair and thrown down all the flowers at her feet, and they would forgiver her, eagerly, lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven.
