there is nothing more astonishing than a human face

"And I'm glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that, too. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any." from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

to be a mother is to be an illusion

"Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child--not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance." from Nicole Krauss's Great House