Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all.

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.

Clean and acceptable. It would be something to know what that felt like, even for an hour or two.

The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.' There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience.

She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

I thought I had learned not to set my heart on anything.

I need not fear that the Lord would come to me with His sorrows.

She] was horribly in love with that man. You can't go on forever thinking about nothing at all, and he had a nice face and that laugh, and what harm was there in it since she could hardly even bring herself to look at him.

To condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.

The word preacher comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.

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.

Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.

Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one's neighbors.

They're married people." Lila had no particular notion of what the word "married" meant, except that there was an endless, pleasant joke between them that excluded everybody else and that all the rest of them were welcome to admire.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity.

An intensely lonely man for whom life had not gone well - I believe this was your language.

An intensely lonely man for whom life has not gone well - I believe this was your language.

It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution.

I didn't feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.

We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself.

So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention.