Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

I admit the child a rarity, but a rarity in the right direction, and therefore a being with whom humanity has the greater need to be made acquainted. Whatever the custom of the age, I insist that that which ought to be presented to its view is the common good uncommonly developed—not because of its rarity, but because it is truer to humanity. It is the noble, not the failure from the noble, that is the true human. If I must show the failure, let it ever be with an eye to the final possible, yea, imperative, success. But in our day, a man who will accept any oddity of idiosyncratic development in manners, tastes, or habits, will refuse, not only as improbable, but as inconsistent with human nature, the representation of a man trying to be merely as noble as is absolutely essential to his being—except, indeed, he be at the same time represented as failing utterly in the attempt. The improbability of there being such a one as Gibbie, judged by the experience of most men, I admit. The impossibility of it, however, I deny, and the absolute unity of such goodness with the true idea of humanity, I believe and assert. (Location 1059)

The waking up of a human soul to know itself arouses so heavy a sense of marvel and inexplicable mystery. When, by slow filmy unveilings, life grew clearer to Gibbie, and he not only knew, but knew that he knew, his thoughts always went back to that day in the meadow with Donal Grant as the beginning of his knowledge of beautiful things in the world of man. Then first he saw nature reflected in the mirror of her humanity. But when or how the change in him began, the turn of the balance, the first push towards life of the evermore invisible germ—of that he remained, much as he wondered, often as he searched his consciousness, ignorant to the last. (Location 1608)

And the bond cannot be very close between father and child, when the father has forsaken his childhood. The bond between any two is the one in the other. It is the father in the child, and the child in the father, that reach to each other eternal hands. (Location 1878)

When he sank foiled from any endeavour to understand how a man was to behave in certain circumstances, he always took refuge in doing something—and doing it better than before, leaped the more eagerly if Robert called him, spoke the more gently to Oscar, turned the sheep more careful not to scare them—as if by instinct he perceived that the only hope of understanding lies in doing. He would run to do the thing he had learned yesterday, when as yet he could find no answer to the question of today. (Location 2454)

Imagination is a poor root, but a worthy blossom, and in a nature like Gibbie’s its flowers cannot fail to be lovely. (Location 3058)

No man can order his life, for it comes flowing over him from behind. But if it lay before us, and we could watch its current approaching from a long distance, what could we do with it before it had reached the now? Even a wise man thinks foolishly who imagines he could have done this and that with his own character and development, if he had but known this and that in time. The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work—to do every moment’s duty aright. That is the only part in the process allotted to us. Then let come—not what will, for there is no such thing—but what the eternal Thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us from the first. If men would but believe that they are in process of creation, and consent to be made—let the maker handle them as the potter his clay, yielding themselves in respondent motion and submissive hopeful action with the turning of his wheel, they would before long find themselves able to welcome every pressure of that hand upon them. Even when that pressure is felt in pain, they would not only believe but recognize the divine end in view, which is the bringing of a son into glory. If, however, they behave like children who struggle and scream while their mother washes and dresses them, they will find they have to be washed and dressed, notwithstanding, and may one day find themselves set half naked and but half dried in a corner, to come to their right minds, and ask to be finished. (Location 4282)