Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

Grant me on earth what seems Thee best, Till death and Heav'n reveal the rest.   —Isaac Watts

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.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone.

I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.

I think it is notable in this connection that it is not Adam but the Lord who rebukes Cain.

Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.

And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another. Everybody is vulnerable. It's kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility.

It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?

Schon bald nach ihrer Heirat war sie zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass Liebe zur Hälfte aus einer Sehnsucht bestand, die durch Besitz nicht zu lindern war.

I have decided the two options for me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I have believe I have done, by dwelling on them.

You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn't even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn't such a villain after all.

Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet.

how can one human being mean so much to another human being in terms of peace and assurance, as if loyalty were as real as gravity.

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.

While the Citizen can entertain aspirations for the society as a whole and take pride in its achievements, the Taxpayer, as presently imagined, simply does not want to pay taxes. The societal consequences of this aversion--failing infrastructure, for example--are to be preferred to any inroad on his or her momentary fiefdom.

Thinking that we know more than we do, therefore rejecting what we are given as experience, blinds us to our ignorance, which is the deep darkness where truth abides. And our wealth of ignorance grows and multiplies. Much

Che cosa ho da lasciarti se non le rovine di un antico coraggio, e la tradizione di antiche prodezze e speranze? Ebbene, come ho già detto, ormai è tutto quanto ridotto a un tizzone, e sicuramente un giorno il Signore vi aliterà sopra facendolo fiammeggiare di nuovo.

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.

And now they say my heart is failing. The doctor used the term angina pectoris, which has a theological sound, like misericordia.

Much more prayer is called for, clearly, but first I will take a nap.

You're my wife," he said. "I want to take care of you, even if that means someday seeing you to the train.