Marilynne Robinson Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Marilynne Robinson on Wise Famous Quotes.
He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life.
You're 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.
It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
I believe the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don't have.
She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all.
There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid
I really enjoyed my kids. They were good boys, you know, and interesting. And they didn't wear me out.
Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.
I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
You're my wife," he said. "I want to take care of you, even if that means someday seeing you to the train.
I am in a state of categorical unbelief. I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean. (Jack Boughton)
And she was old, too. For a woman being old just means not being young, and all the youth had been worked out of her before it had really even set in.
When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.
Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.
She'd thought the world was just hayfields and cornfields and and bean fields and apple orchards. The people who owned them and the people who didn't.
I find that the hardest work in the world ... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.
Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.
The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.
In St. Louis one of the girls had said to her, Just pretend you're pretty so they can pretend you're pretty.
We are culturally predisposed to sheltering criticism from criticism; we have enshrined the iconoclast
But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.
I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.
If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.
I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me.
I have spent years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of . . . people who do not exist.
Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would sound very sad, and it wasn't, really.
The fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done.
When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.
In eternity people's lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either.
Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.
The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
To condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.
The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maiden.
In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?
My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places.
That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.
There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being.
It is clearly true that the reflex of disparagement is no more compatible with rigorous inquiry than the impulse to glorify.
But it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.
It was an experience I might have missed. Now I only fear I will not have time enough to fully enjoy the thought of it.
In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you're pretty.
We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.
My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.
It seems as though the conclusions are never as interesting as the questions. I mean, they're not what you remember.
Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.