Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

It was an experience I might have missed. Now I only fear I will not have time enough to fully enjoy the thought of it.

walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us.

Oh, I am a limited man, and old, and he will still be his inexplicable mortal self when I am dust.

She had followed her father's thoughts back to that old bitterness, and the bitterness simmered in his half-closed eyes as he reflected on the inevitability of his disappointment.

That there have been wars I have no doubt. I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.

You, she said. He laughed. Who else? She said, Nobody else in this world.

In retrospect, I'm very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept me alone until your mother came. Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.

So began a long instruction in whatever he could trust her to forgive.

Loneliness is not a problem, it is a passion.

Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace." Nothing could be more

You know, I actually sort of enjoy my life. I know I shouldn't. It could stand a lot of improvement. But maybe it's the feeling you have that makes a life bad. Or makes it all right enough most of the time.

Marilynne Robinson has written a deeply romantic love story embodied in the language and ideas of Calvinist doctrine. She really is not like any other writer. She really isn't Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Robinson has created a small, rich, and fearless body of work in which religion exists unashamedly, as does doubt, unashamedly.

The physicality enshrined by the neuroscientists as the measure of all things is not objectivity but instead a pure artifact of the scale at which and the means by which we and our devices perceive. So to invoke it as the test and standard of reality is quintessentially anthropocentric.

Gilead is a book that deserves to be read slowly, thoughtfully, and repeatedly … I would like to see copies of it dropped onto pews across our country, where it could sit among the Bibles and hymnals and collection envelopes. It would be a good reminder of what it means to lead a noble and moral life—and, for that matter, what it means to write a truly great novel."—Ann Patchett, The Village Voice

Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light.

I got feelings I don't know the names for. There probly ain't any names. Probly nobody else ever had 'em. I tell you what, I wouldn't wish 'em on a snake.

It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law.

A shabby fellow with a furtive air can be as gallant as the next man, depending on circumstances. The

I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

Nothing can account for the reductionist tendencies among neuroscientists except a lack of rigor and consistency, a loyalty to conclusions that are prior to evidence and argument, and an indifference to science as a whole.

So per esperienza che il rimorso è capace di irrompere da una breccia piccolissima e inondare il paesaggio, dimorandovi in pozze e umori con la stessa naturalezza dell'acqua.

We take fortuitous resemblences among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.