Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

There was no more the stoop of her high

So it couldn't matter much how life seemed. The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either. Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn't try. Things happen the way they do. Why was a foolish question. In a song a note follows the one before because it is that song and not another one.

Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we realize that experience does not accumulate like money, or memories, or like years and frailties.

I remember once my father and my grandfather were sitting on the porch together, crackling and shelling black walnuts. They loved each other's company, when they weren't at each other's throats, which meant when they were silent, as they were that day.

When people feel they know who to blame or to snicker at, they seldom feel the need to know more.

It was another cabin with a stoop, and a dooryard beaten bare.

The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.

Szerintem a transzcendencia gondolata a teremtés félreértelmezésén alapszik. Minden tiszteletet megérdemel az ég, de a csoda helyszíne itt van köztünk.

Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to bear this in mind.

you have to do it till you're done

Every day, as a Christian, I feel more deeply that the faith is slandered by those people who call America a Christian nation.

I know it'll be all right, but it makes me mad.

Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be

The truth about Obama's birthplace or Trump's relationship with Russia will never be established to the satisfaction of everyone, but Christians know truth of another order, that human beings are created in the image of God. They are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights--that is, unalienable claims on our respect. This is the truth that has made us free.

No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me. This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God's compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable.

But when folks are down to the one thing that keeps them alive, that one thing can be meanness. It

I think it must have been my mothers plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.

if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.

He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior

Clothed as he was in the garments of misfeasance and bewilderment, there lived in him a deeply arrogant man.