Jayber Says...

I finished Jayber Crow on Monday. In celebration, I thought I’d post a few of my favorite quotes, currently residing in my commonplace book (a red Clairefontaine journal that loves fountain pen inks) written in Noodler’s bulletproof Iraqi Indigo ink (a permanent, soft, sort of greyish/violetish-blue - very easy on the eyes and a Pendemonium exclusive) with a Lamy blue AL Star fine-point fountain pen.

It was impossible to hurry there, and so I settled myself into patience.

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I became a sort of garden fanatic and I am not over it yet. You can take a few seed peas, dry and dead, and sow them in a little furrow, and they will sprout into a row of pea vines and bear more peas - it may not be a miracle, but that is a matter of opinion.

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After the Depression and the war and the years of work that they were now beginning to think of as slow and too hard, the country people were trying to get away from demanding circumstances. … We couldn’t quite see at the time, or didn’t want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together.

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They did not approve of government approval.

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“God loves Port William as it is,” I thought. “Why else should He want it to be better than it is?”

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…as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.