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A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She show more becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves. Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic. show lessTags
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charl08 In both novels, key character faces new, difficult choices in new places. Both beautifully written, compelling.
Member Reviews
Lila is for me the last book in the Gilead series which is certainly one of the canons of American literature. I tend to enjoy novelist who revisit their characters or settings. Some of my favorites include Harry Angstrom of the Rabbit novels, Elizabeth Strout's Olive and Lucy Barton, Sully from Russo's Bath novels and maybe include Jennifer Egan's revisit of the Good Squad. It's like returning home from a long trip. With Robinson even she doesn't worry about chronologically charting her characters so I don't think reading Lila after Jack is not a problem; each novel reveals little insights into the history of the Ames and Broughton families from Iowa. Perhaps there is still room for Broughton's son who is becoming a doctor.
In this show more wonderful novel we learn about how Lila, neglected as a baby, is stolen by Doll who acts as her mother while they wander about looking for work and trying to survive. Doll teaches Lila the difference between them and the real poor: "the ones who never touched a comb to their hair and who always had shadows of grimne on their necks and wore unmended clothes till they were falling off them’. " They travel for a time with another family until the Crash of '29 when work ended. Robinson takes the entire narrative to gradually reveal some parts of Lila's history, especially an unhappy stay inn St. Louis, but her chance encounter of stopping in the Reverend Ames's church will change both their lives forever. "He looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness, and that was all right. It was one thing she understood about him."
"It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”
The relationship between the two is immensely satisfying as it is revealed in snippets of conversations and gestures. The writing is thoughtful, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the use of language. Highly recommend all of her novels.
Lines:
I was working in a whorehouse because the woman who stole me when I was a child got blood all over my clothes when she came to my room after she killed my father in a knife fight. I've got her knife here in my garter. I was meaning to steal a child for myself, but I missed the chance and I couldn't stand the disappointment, so I got a job cleaning in a hotel.
That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.
She knew better than to waste that time. There isn't always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you're being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was little enough to carry, she could hardly bring herself to put him down.
She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.
She thought, if we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table and me, I don't know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we're here he'll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones. show less
In this show more wonderful novel we learn about how Lila, neglected as a baby, is stolen by Doll who acts as her mother while they wander about looking for work and trying to survive. Doll teaches Lila the difference between them and the real poor: "the ones who never touched a comb to their hair and who always had shadows of grimne on their necks and wore unmended clothes till they were falling off them’. " They travel for a time with another family until the Crash of '29 when work ended. Robinson takes the entire narrative to gradually reveal some parts of Lila's history, especially an unhappy stay inn St. Louis, but her chance encounter of stopping in the Reverend Ames's church will change both their lives forever. "He looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness, and that was all right. It was one thing she understood about him."
"It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”
The relationship between the two is immensely satisfying as it is revealed in snippets of conversations and gestures. The writing is thoughtful, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the use of language. Highly recommend all of her novels.
Lines:
I was working in a whorehouse because the woman who stole me when I was a child got blood all over my clothes when she came to my room after she killed my father in a knife fight. I've got her knife here in my garter. I was meaning to steal a child for myself, but I missed the chance and I couldn't stand the disappointment, so I got a job cleaning in a hotel.
That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.
She knew better than to waste that time. There isn't always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you're being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was little enough to carry, she could hardly bring herself to put him down.
She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.
She thought, if we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table and me, I don't know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we're here he'll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones. show less
This book is painfully beautiful. Like all of Robinson's books, Lila is slow and rich and filled with gorgeous prose and open spaces. Those who have read other books in this series (I refuse to say "trilogy" since that forecloses the possibility of another book) know a bit about Lila. She is featured in the first book, Gilead. This book is told completely from Lila's perspective, and she is not an easy woman to spend 260 pages with. Lila is difficult, she is defensive and mean, uncultured and sometimes uncivil. But there are reasons for all of those qualities, and she is also smart and engaged, honest and loyal. Most of all she is interesting. She asks questions, good ones, that no one I know ever asks. She does nothing simply because show more that is the way things are done, she is never reflexive but rather always reflective. Her sense of honor may differ from ours, but it is so immutable it is hard not to admire her. It is also hard not to celebrate when she finds comfort, finds perhaps the only person in the universe who understands her and never tries to take things she is unable or unwilling to give. Prepare to spend hours of internal dialogue on the nature of grace, both personal and divine. I read The Goldfinch just before this book (which I loved, this is not an insult to that wonderful book) but this 260 page book took me longer to read than that 760 page book. That is not because I was bored or unengaged, but because there is so much to think about, I found I would read a couple pages and then spend half an hour thinking about something I found within that text. This novel is like a bit of Christian Talmud, a commentary that illuminates the source material for faith. I have never spent so much time examining my faith and my relationship to others in the world, and I am the better for it. show less
Ah, it's so lovely and bittersweet to visit Iowa with Marilynne Robinson's characters again! I think of it, and I feel inspired to take a deep breath and let it out slowly, just being in Robinson's beautiful and painful world.
Reading this book, I'm struck by the idea that "right" and "wrong" are relative to some degree, or at the very least difficult to classify, and the idea that redemption can be gained by choosing whether to continue or break the patterns of one's earlier life. There's also this element of how anticipating previous patterns can produce the very outcome that we're dreading, as with Lila and John's anticipation of her and the baby's leaving (by various routes). I also find it interesting that although Lila hears and show more follows the call towards love all along, she can't perceive it with any clarity until she moves to Gilead, away from all of the people and patterns and history that's been obscuring her vision.
I love how Lila reflects so personally on the stories in the Bible. She's like a natural seminarian (at least in my limited experience of seminarians). Lila seems much rougher in this book than I thought of her in Gilead and Home, perhaps because in this one we see Lila more through her own eyes than through others', and she's much less forgiving of herself than those around her are. Now I need to go back and re-read Gilead and Home with this new perspective.
This is a difficult book to quote, but I've picked out one that speaks to me that I think will hold up well even pulled out of the context of the whole story. It's from when Lila observes John Ames performing the baptism at the river. She sees him as: "A preacher doing what preachers do to give you what safety they can." (100) That one partial sentence describes for me both the powerlessness of the preacher and the profound hope that he has to keep people safe despite this powerlessness. It's not magic, but only words and ritual, and it's amazing not just that the preacher continues offering these things despite his awareness of their limited power but also that sometimes this offering seems to work. show less
Reading this book, I'm struck by the idea that "right" and "wrong" are relative to some degree, or at the very least difficult to classify, and the idea that redemption can be gained by choosing whether to continue or break the patterns of one's earlier life. There's also this element of how anticipating previous patterns can produce the very outcome that we're dreading, as with Lila and John's anticipation of her and the baby's leaving (by various routes). I also find it interesting that although Lila hears and show more follows the call towards love all along, she can't perceive it with any clarity until she moves to Gilead, away from all of the people and patterns and history that's been obscuring her vision.
I love how Lila reflects so personally on the stories in the Bible. She's like a natural seminarian (at least in my limited experience of seminarians). Lila seems much rougher in this book than I thought of her in Gilead and Home, perhaps because in this one we see Lila more through her own eyes than through others', and she's much less forgiving of herself than those around her are. Now I need to go back and re-read Gilead and Home with this new perspective.
This is a difficult book to quote, but I've picked out one that speaks to me that I think will hold up well even pulled out of the context of the whole story. It's from when Lila observes John Ames performing the baptism at the river. She sees him as: "A preacher doing what preachers do to give you what safety they can." (100) That one partial sentence describes for me both the powerlessness of the preacher and the profound hope that he has to keep people safe despite this powerlessness. It's not magic, but only words and ritual, and it's amazing not just that the preacher continues offering these things despite his awareness of their limited power but also that sometimes this offering seems to work. show less
Is it unfair of me to compare this book to Robinson’s [b:Gilead|68210|Gilead|Marilynne Robinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327936326s/68210.jpg|2481792], and find it lacking?
I have not read [b:Home|2924318|Home (Gilead, #2)|Marilynne Robinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327882472s/2924318.jpg|2951639], the second book in the “Gilead saga”, having jumped from Gilead to Lila, and I now wonder if this was a mistake. That, maybe, the transition from the narration of Gilead to the story of Lila would not feel so distant.
I still liked “Lila” very much, and would recommend it wholehearted. But I do feel that Marilynne Robinson never achieved the same meditative quality that permeated Gilead . This is probably unfair of me, as show more an author is not supposed to write the same book over and over, and here I am complaining. I don’t think I wanted the same book though, but I wanted the same feeling, and actually I think that Robinson was aiming at it and failed.
Like in Gilead, Robinson is obviously attempting a philosophical discussion on Christian beliefs. Through the character of Lila, she voices questions of redemption and salvation. But, like the answers of the major Christian denominations, I felt a disconnect with her attempt here.
Again, I might be at fault. I confess that the references to the book of Ezekiel were above my understanding of the Bible, and that I should read it before I move on to other books, but the truth is that I am not interested. If the questionings of Rev. John Ames spoke so deeply to me in Gilead , the questionings of an afterlife, as deeply worrisome as they were to Lila, don’t interest me. I liked the character of Lila, I suffered with her and for her. Her life, her inner strength and loneliness were so raw. But I wanted to shake her and say: Hell and heaven are a false construct. If there is a God, then we will be together with those that we loved!
At the end I think that Marilynne Robinson stepped in the most dangerous minefield in Christianity: the idea of a heavenly afterlife as a prize to Christians only. I think it was a courageous attempt, but one that inevitably will lead to dogmatic answers.
Still, I am giving it 4 stars because the writing is poetic and natural, and the inner lives of so many characters were true. Their humanity, loneliness and struggles so real. show less
I have not read [b:Home|2924318|Home (Gilead, #2)|Marilynne Robinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327882472s/2924318.jpg|2951639], the second book in the “Gilead saga”, having jumped from Gilead to Lila, and I now wonder if this was a mistake. That, maybe, the transition from the narration of Gilead to the story of Lila would not feel so distant.
I still liked “Lila” very much, and would recommend it wholehearted. But I do feel that Marilynne Robinson never achieved the same meditative quality that permeated Gilead . This is probably unfair of me, as show more an author is not supposed to write the same book over and over, and here I am complaining. I don’t think I wanted the same book though, but I wanted the same feeling, and actually I think that Robinson was aiming at it and failed.
Like in Gilead, Robinson is obviously attempting a philosophical discussion on Christian beliefs. Through the character of Lila, she voices questions of redemption and salvation. But, like the answers of the major Christian denominations, I felt a disconnect with her attempt here.
Again, I might be at fault. I confess that the references to the book of Ezekiel were above my understanding of the Bible, and that I should read it before I move on to other books, but the truth is that I am not interested. If the questionings of Rev. John Ames spoke so deeply to me in Gilead , the questionings of an afterlife, as deeply worrisome as they were to Lila, don’t interest me. I liked the character of Lila, I suffered with her and for her. Her life, her inner strength and loneliness were so raw. But I wanted to shake her and say: Hell and heaven are a false construct. If there is a God, then we will be together with those that we loved!
At the end I think that Marilynne Robinson stepped in the most dangerous minefield in Christianity: the idea of a heavenly afterlife as a prize to Christians only. I think it was a courageous attempt, but one that inevitably will lead to dogmatic answers.
Still, I am giving it 4 stars because the writing is poetic and natural, and the inner lives of so many characters were true. Their humanity, loneliness and struggles so real. show less
"Gilead", the precursor to this book, is one of the most beautiful and memorable books I've read. It's narrated by John Ames, an elderly Calvinist minister in mid-century Iowa, in a series of letters to his very young son, whom he doesn't expect to see grow up. "Lila" tells the story of John's much younger wife, and it's every bit the equal to "Gilead" in its power. I will be haunted by these characters for years, and re-reading their stories, and keeping company with them, will be a welcome activity for me as time passes and I search for grace in my own life.
Marilynne Robinson's Lila is the third book, following her Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead and Home, set in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. In Gilead, elderly Reverend John Ames has a very young wife named Lila and young son, whom he is writing a long letter to which is the story of the novel.
In Lila, we get to know more of Lila, the enigmatic, quiet figure from the periphery of Gilead. The beginning of the book introduces us to the young child Lila, freezing out on a door stoop after someone got tired of her crying. A poor woman named Doll came to her rescue, and takes the severely neglected and abused Lila and runs away.
There is a heartbreaking scene as Doll takes Lila to another house, where the woman there gently cleans up the show more sick and exhausted Lila. It made me cry and that was just page seven.
Lila has had a hard life and one day while walking through Gilead, she finds herself exhausted and sees a little abandoned house. She stays there for weeks, living on fish and dandelion greens. She wanders into town and ends up at Reverend John Ames' church during services.
After church, she stops by John Ames' home and he invites her in. Watching their relationship blossom, the tender way he cares for Lila and the way she comes to care for him is beautiful, like watching a flower slowly blossom and bloom. Lila works on instinct, and Reverend Ames on intellect, yet they manage to find a way to each other.
The writing is gorgeous, the kind that makes want to re-read passages over again to get a full appreciation of Robinson's poetry and skill, like this one:
So when she was done at Mrs. Graham's house she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you'd know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher's father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.
Lila is a work of art, a quiet book that will pull at your heartstrings and maybe look at people in a different way. It won many awards last year, including The National Book Critics Circle Award, and made many publications Top Ten Lists. It is a book to contemplate and savor. I give it my highest recommendation. show less
In Lila, we get to know more of Lila, the enigmatic, quiet figure from the periphery of Gilead. The beginning of the book introduces us to the young child Lila, freezing out on a door stoop after someone got tired of her crying. A poor woman named Doll came to her rescue, and takes the severely neglected and abused Lila and runs away.
There is a heartbreaking scene as Doll takes Lila to another house, where the woman there gently cleans up the show more sick and exhausted Lila. It made me cry and that was just page seven.
Lila has had a hard life and one day while walking through Gilead, she finds herself exhausted and sees a little abandoned house. She stays there for weeks, living on fish and dandelion greens. She wanders into town and ends up at Reverend John Ames' church during services.
After church, she stops by John Ames' home and he invites her in. Watching their relationship blossom, the tender way he cares for Lila and the way she comes to care for him is beautiful, like watching a flower slowly blossom and bloom. Lila works on instinct, and Reverend Ames on intellect, yet they manage to find a way to each other.
The writing is gorgeous, the kind that makes want to re-read passages over again to get a full appreciation of Robinson's poetry and skill, like this one:
So when she was done at Mrs. Graham's house she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you'd know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher's father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.
Lila is a work of art, a quiet book that will pull at your heartstrings and maybe look at people in a different way. It won many awards last year, including The National Book Critics Circle Award, and made many publications Top Ten Lists. It is a book to contemplate and savor. I give it my highest recommendation. show less
I certainly won't detract from my praise for Marilynne Robinson (see my review of Home), but I had a bit more trouble with this third part of the Gilead series. Once again Robinson changes the perspective, now to Lila, the young wife of the much older reverend John Ames. As an orphan she has had a quite poor and eventful childhood, living the life of a vagabond, ending up in a marginal gang, and even in a brothel. The atmosphere in this novel is strongly reminiscent of John Steinbeck, with even explicit references to the Depression and Dust Bowl period (i.e. the 1930s) that is so powerfully drawn in Grapes of Wrath.
During her lonely wanderings, Lila by chance ends up in Gilead, Iowa, and thus inevitably comes into contact with Reverend show more John Ames, who had lost his wife and child a long while ago and seemed exhausted. Ames and Lila seem like two extremes: he a thoughtful, struggling intellectual, she a rude and bruised orphan girl. Yet a moving dynamic arises between the two; the way they interact is so careful, thoughtful, and tactful that it almost physically hurts to follow. Quite unexpectedly, for both of them, they even get married. Surprising also for the reader, because we constantly see Lila deliberating whether she should move on or not. Even when she becomes pregnant by Ames those doubts remain, and the great thing is that Ames appears to be all too aware of them.
Especially in the second half of the book, Lila continues to muse about her turbulent past, about the dramatic events in it, and about the main characters of that period, especially her surrogate mother Doll. That past continues to pull at her persistently, especially because of the knife she received from Doll, with which the latter had stabbed to death a man who might have been Lila's father. The Calvinist religious-moral framework in which Robinson places her stories obviously plays an important role in all this. From that light, you can see Lila as a kind of Mary Magdalene, who is carefully guided by Ames to the right path, but who also has a moral compass that is so strong that, eventually, she can appreciate the uniqueness of what is happening between them. From Lila's point of view, there is the constant threat of damnation, a pull to evil even, that she actively struggles with. And with that Robinson brings us to territory that is pretty familiar to her.
Once again: this third Gilead part also plays at a very high level in terms of literature, and in terms of content, the sketch of Lila's gradual redemption is particularly existentially relevant. But I did have some difficulty with the structure of this novel: the accumulation of constant flashbacks and streams of consciousness make this book very difficult to read. In 'Home' you still had the sublime dialogues between the protagonists to keep the story bearable, and that is much more lacking here, especially in the second half of the book. Hence my slightly lower rating. But that does not detract from the fact that Robinson with Lila has created a character that, in terms of psychological and existential depth, can compete with the most striking of Greek or Shakespearean tragedies. show less
During her lonely wanderings, Lila by chance ends up in Gilead, Iowa, and thus inevitably comes into contact with Reverend show more John Ames, who had lost his wife and child a long while ago and seemed exhausted. Ames and Lila seem like two extremes: he a thoughtful, struggling intellectual, she a rude and bruised orphan girl. Yet a moving dynamic arises between the two; the way they interact is so careful, thoughtful, and tactful that it almost physically hurts to follow. Quite unexpectedly, for both of them, they even get married. Surprising also for the reader, because we constantly see Lila deliberating whether she should move on or not. Even when she becomes pregnant by Ames those doubts remain, and the great thing is that Ames appears to be all too aware of them.
Especially in the second half of the book, Lila continues to muse about her turbulent past, about the dramatic events in it, and about the main characters of that period, especially her surrogate mother Doll. That past continues to pull at her persistently, especially because of the knife she received from Doll, with which the latter had stabbed to death a man who might have been Lila's father. The Calvinist religious-moral framework in which Robinson places her stories obviously plays an important role in all this. From that light, you can see Lila as a kind of Mary Magdalene, who is carefully guided by Ames to the right path, but who also has a moral compass that is so strong that, eventually, she can appreciate the uniqueness of what is happening between them. From Lila's point of view, there is the constant threat of damnation, a pull to evil even, that she actively struggles with. And with that Robinson brings us to territory that is pretty familiar to her.
Once again: this third Gilead part also plays at a very high level in terms of literature, and in terms of content, the sketch of Lila's gradual redemption is particularly existentially relevant. But I did have some difficulty with the structure of this novel: the accumulation of constant flashbacks and streams of consciousness make this book very difficult to read. In 'Home' you still had the sublime dialogues between the protagonists to keep the story bearable, and that is much more lacking here, especially in the second half of the book. Hence my slightly lower rating. But that does not detract from the fact that Robinson with Lila has created a character that, in terms of psychological and existential depth, can compete with the most striking of Greek or Shakespearean tragedies. show less
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ThingScore 100
With Lila, Marilynne Robinson completes her mythic cycle, this intimate portrait of an imaginary town filled with very real people. Like her forebears James Joyce, William Faulkner and William Kennedy, among others, Robinson has created a world unto itself, as cleanly evoked as Dublin, Yoknapatawpha County or Albany; only in Robinson’s case, her alternate universe is one of the blessed show more places of the earth. show less
added by zhejw
You don’t need an ounce of faith to be stunned and moved by Lila. God has never been so attractive as he is in Robinson’s depiction, but her heart is with the human experience, in all its forms. Lila and Ames are lonely souls, worn out by sadness and suffering, but they learn how to be together and find salvation, of a sort. Robinson writes Lila in a mystifyingly impressive amalgam of show more recollection and spontaneously unfolding thought. Sometimes you feel the ideas are being born fresh on the page, and yet they also contain a depth of thinking and feeling that only years of work can summon. Taken together, with Lila as the culmination, these books will surely be read and known in time as one of the great achievements of contemporary literature. An embarrassingly grand statement for such gentle, graceful work. show less
added by zhejw
Robinson shakes her finger at whoever she thinks needs to learn a lesson. I’m not saying that great novelists haven’t done this before (see “War and Peace”), only that it didn’t necessarily benefit their work. Robinson writes about religion two ways. One is meliorist, reformist. The other is rapturous, visionary. Many people have been good at the first kind; few at the second kind, show more at least today.
The second kind is Robinson’s forte. show less
The second kind is Robinson’s forte. show less
added by melmore
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Author Information
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Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her other novels include Mother Country and Lila. Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award and Home won the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her nonfiction books include When I Was a Child I show more Read Books, Absence of Mind, and The Death of Adam. She was the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016. She has been named the winner of the Richard C Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award as part of the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She was included on Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Lila
- Original publication date
- 2014
- People/Characters
- Lila; John Ames; Doane; Doll
- Important places
- Iowa, USA
- Important events
- Great Depression
- Dedication
- To IOWA
- First words
- The child was just there on the stoop in the dark, hugging herself against the cold, all cried out and nearly sleeping.
- Quotations
- What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by?
And the old man did look as though every blessing he had forgotten to hope for had descended on him all at once, for the time being.
He was happier than he wanted her to see, relieved even though he knew it was too soon to trust that they were safe yet, and worried that he was too ready to be happy and relieved. After breakfast he set a little glass bowl ... (show all)on the porch railing to catch some snow as it fell, and when he saw it had stopped falling, he took the bowl out to the rosebushes to pluck snow that had caught in the brambles. He brought it inside and set it on the windowsill so the sun would melt it. It was pretty the way the light made kind of a little flame, floating in the middle of the water, burning away in there cold as could be. It was for christening the child, she knew without asking. If the child came struggling into the world, that water would be ready for him. If it had to be his only blessing, then it would be a pure and lovely blessing. That was the old man getting ready to make the best of the worst that could happen. Not my will but thine. In his sermons he was always reminding himself of that prayer.
You are right not to talk. It's a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there's no telling what you'll say (p. 20).
Clean an acceptable. It would be something to know what that felt like, even for an hour or two (p. 67)
The evening and the morning. sleeping and waking. Hunger and loneliness and weariness and still wanting more of it. Existence (p. 75)
She had never been at home i all the years of her life. She wouldn't know how to begin (p. 107)
Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all part of one thing. Nothi... (show all)ng makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except i His eternal, freely given constancy (p. 223).
It could be that the wildest, strangest thing in the Bible were the places where it touched earth (p. 226).
I feel like Moses on the mountain, looking out on the life he will never have. Then I think of the life I do have. And that starts me thinking about the life I won't have. All that beautiful life. (p. 256).
There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fears had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them (p. 260). - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Someday she would tell him what she knew.
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