Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preoisterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.

Everywhere the crisis of the private financial system has been transformed into a tale of slovenly and overweening government that perpetuates and is perpetuated by a dependent and demanding population... For about ten days the crisis was interpreted as a consequence of the ineptitude of the highly paid, and then it transmogrified into a grudge against the populace at large.

Then I realised that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them... And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time...

And there I was, trudging through the same old nowhere, day after day, always wanting to slow down, to sit down, to lie down, with my father walking on ahead, no doubt a little desperate, as he had every right to be.

If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn't have to worry about any of this.

In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.

It is the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.

He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.

There is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the innocence of children.

And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.

Mes nuolat atmetame liudijimus, i kuriuos reiktu isiklausyti. Tai yra mes esame taip isitikine savo nuomones teisumu, kas visi parodymai, kurie jos nepatvirtina, laikomi nepagristais. Sitaip niekada nepasieksime to, ka galima butu pavadinti tiesa.

my father in law] told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing. . . . Nothing with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe. . . . It's why I keep to myself. When I can.

That's how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed.

I'm a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.

What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend, and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by? And that was when the times were decent.

In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you're pretty.

Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries.

My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can't make any real account of myself without speaking of it.

The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking—that is, in thinking that by definition is not one's own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted—is a capitulation no one should ever make.

How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.

I do believe that we stand at a threshold, as Bonhoeffer did, and that the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as I see it, in the knowledge that no society is at any time immune to moral catastrophe.

I talked once with a cabdriver who had spent years in prison. He said he had no idea that the world was something he could be interested in. And then he read a book.

The second you walk off down that road I'll start telling myself you're gone for good, and why wouldn't you be, and I'll start trying to hate you for it. I will hate you for it. I might even leave here entirely.