Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

I have always wondered if the Commandments should be read as occurring in order of importance. If that is correct, honoring your mother is more important than not committing murder. That seems remarkable, though I am open to the idea.

Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.

Már egy ideje házasok voltak, amikor arra a következtetésre jutott, hogy a szerelem részben olyan vágy, amelyet a birtoklás nem enyhít.

Nevertheless, I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level, it expresses a lack of faith.

We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal.

The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so.

When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said "I prefer to remember that I have kept one.

I always tell my students that you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you're doing, you're not doing it well enough.

Boughton takes a very dim view of him, because he unsettled the faith of many people, but I take issue as much with those people as with Feuerbach. It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled.

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.

She said, "meaninglessness would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.

He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly didn't want to have.

The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.

Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being—for those who create and master them, at least. Now

That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something. She

When did he first notice that in himself, that little fascination with damage and its consequences? He might alarm her. He might mean to alarm her. Doing damage to this fragile night because it was such an isolated thing, an accident, with a look of meaning about it and no meaning at all.

There was no reason for Doane to tie a ribbon on Marcelle's wrist, and that was why she laughed when he did it, and loved him for it.

Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning.

I write a book because there is a voice in my mind, a burden of narrative. Of course I am pleased that these voices interest other people, too. When I write I am always aware that perception is beautiful, and that to be human is a very high and very complicated privilege. I want my fiction to be true, and to me these are very essential truths.

So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist.

When defects of character are your character, you become a what.

It's television that makes things seem important, whether they are or not.

You would never have imagined that almost empty sanctuary, just a few women there with heavy veils on to try to hide the masks they were wearing, and two or three men. I preached with a scarf around my mouth for more than a year. Everyone smelled like onions, because word went around that flu germs were killed by onions. People rubbed themselves down with tobacco leaves.

People don't talk much now about the Spanish influenza.... People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They'd sit as far from each other as they could. There was talk that Germans has caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.