Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.

You never bother me, Glory. It's remarkable how much you don't bother me. Almost unprecedented.

History could make a stone weep.

A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?

Why must we be left, the survivors picking among the flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?

So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to say to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn't really an answer to my question, We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though and I did no more baptising until I was ordained.

Doll always said, Just be quiet. Whatever it is, just wait for it to be over. Everything ends sometime.

There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them

It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.

Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.

He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn't even know he wanted, and here it was.

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.

The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other. Ames

He said, I'm glad to see you. Why? He laughed. Well, that's what people say sometimes. Besides, I AM glad to see you. They walked on like that, right past the store. She said, Why? He laughed again. You ask such interesting questions. And you don't answer 'em. He nodded. 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.

I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.

Nothing could be more miraculous than the fact that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and are moved by what is beautiful.

one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.