Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

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)

He was waiting to see what she would make of him, as they say. And then he would be what she made of him.

Cleverness has a special piquancy when it blooms out of the fraying sleeve of failure.

You're right not to talk. It's sort of a higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there's no telling what you'll say.

There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe.

And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair.

It was as if the light had coaxed a flowering from the frost, which before seemed barren and parched as salt. The grass shone with petal colors, and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerably as petals.

In St. Louis one of the girls had said to her, Just pretend you're pretty so they can pretend you're pretty.

My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do all we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

Cranky old Leviticus gave us—gave Christ—not only "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" but also the rather forgotten "Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself," two verses that appear to be merged in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

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.

The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape.

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

Time that had not come yet — an anomaly in itself — had the fiercest reality for her.

After a while she said, If you make a sound it's just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it's a word. It means something. It can't not mean something.

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

So many of earth's grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.

God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.

The fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done.

The immense water thunked and thudded beneath my head, and I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.

There was something that charmed her in the fact that her brother, the one true worldling in the whole tribe of Boughtons, seemed to be asking her for advice, or for wisdom, standing there in the sunlight with the wind hushing in the dusty lilacs of their childhood and laundry swaying on the lines where their school clothes used to hang.

She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.