Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

When you're scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it's kindly meant. Now

She closed one eye and looked at me and said, I know there is a blessing in this somewhere.

morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

Chimerical grief — now guilt, now blame, now the thought that it could all have been otherwise. ~ Glory

The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.

I think that in our earlier history--the Gettysburg Address or something--there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.

Embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness.

In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'I' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'I' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.

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. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike

At the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.

But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never knoew what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing

They left a trail of hopscotch behind them, Mellie always thinking of ways to make it harder. They'd be jumping along in the dust, barefoot, with licorice drops in their mouths, feeling as though they had run off with everything in that town that was worth having.

I know more than I know and must learn it from myself.

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he'd spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it.

I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker. And one of the crucial things he brings to me, is that the encounter with another being is an . . . occasion in which you can, to the best of your ability, honour the other person as being someone sent to you by God.

Her father told his children to pray for patience, for courage, for kindness, for clarity, for trust, for gratitude. Those prayers will be answered

It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion in ways and degrees these arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim's progress through earthly life seems to be eroding.

We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth in all its variety because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe.

The difference between theism and new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology. The primordial human tropism toward mystery may well have provided the impetus for all that we have learned.

her father was soothed by these attentions, as if pain were an appetite for comforting of just this kind.

If only she'd known then what comfort was coming, she'd have spared herself a little. You can say to yourself, I'm just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it. You don't have to know why. Well, nothing could ever change if your body didn't just keep you there not even knowing what it is you're waiting for. Not even knowing that you're waiting at all. Just there on the stoop in the moonlight licking up tears.

I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Scientific Socialists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis. Darwin influenced the nationalist writer Heinrich von Treitschke and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who influenced Hitler and also the milieu in which he flourished.

So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.