Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

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.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.

A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.     Once

This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven—one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.

I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.

If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.

doctrine is not the same as belief, it is simply a way talking about it; beliefs are lived

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

The physical body can crave sleep with an animal greed, as everybody knows. Then it is snappish when it is disturbed, as I would have been if I hadn't had the memory, at least, of praying for tranquillity.

That stab in the heart she felt when she woke, and the panicky doubt that her life was in her grasp, not fraud or failure, not entirely - that was a brief misery and one she could set aside by putting the light on and reading for a while. She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word good so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.

She said, "I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don't do that. In your own way, you're kind of—pure.

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. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.

She'd thought the world was just hayfields and cornfields and and bean fields and apple orchards. The people who owned them and the people who didn't.

It is the elegance of nature that creates even the appearance of simplicity... It is not respectable to say that an organism is designed to be both stable as an entity and mutable in response to environment, though it must be said that this complex equilibrium is amazing and beautiful and everywhere repeated in a wealth of variations that can seem like virtuosity regaling itself with its own brilliance.

It is true for everyone that the experience that society gives to us, or denies us, is profoundly formative.

I think through things. It calms me. Otherwise I don't react as well as I could have. As I would have wanted to.

To play catch on an evening, to smell the river, to hear the train pass. These little towns were once the bold ramparts meant to shelter just such peace.

We would not now have a sizable part of our own population prepared to engage in homicidal violence if they truly believed that that young man in the hoodie was an image of God.

We are part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things--justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, and have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.

home, a son. Well, I was a fine, vigorous old man

might be about the difference between love and loneliness, and how people on either side can't understand people on the other.

If being modern means having the understanding and will to oppose the passions of collective life that can at any time emerge to disgrace us and, now, even to destroy us, then one great type of modern man is surely Dietrich Bonhoeffer — more particularly, Pastor Bonhoeffer in his pulpit, Pastor Bonhoeffer at his prayers.

Lila never knew people could be so mean. She was mean, too, because the sadness in that house was like a dream that made everything strange and wrong.