Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

Ideology is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe.

This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope.

it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.

I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing.

I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires.

I don't know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

Doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief.

His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing.

An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don't know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them.

Leaving here is like waking from a trance.

How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened.

The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maiden.

If there was one thing she wished she could save from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him.

How could a child stay alive in a body that felt so dead?

I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

For in fact I wore her coat like beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy, and I would say nothing that might make her loosen her grasp or take one step away

It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me.

It was strange to wonder what she had really forgotten.

There is something real signified by that word 'just' that proper language won't acknowledge. It's a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

but if there was one thing I should have learned from them and did not learn, it was to control my temper. This is wisdom I should have attained a long time ago. Even now, when a flutter of my pulse makes me think of final things, I find myself losing my temper, because a drawer sticks or because I've misplaced my glasses.

Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening in the sky— you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean.

You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. The full soul loatheth an honeycomb, but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.