Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform. Now, I may be wrong here. No such distinction occurs in Scripture. And repentance and reformation are matters of the soul which only the Lord can judge. But, in my experience, dishonor is recalcitrant. When I see it, my heart sinks, because I feel I have no help to offer a dishonorable person. I know the deficiency may be my own altogether.

How you would honor someone differs with circumstances, so you can only truly fulfill a general obligation to show honor in specific cases of mutual intimacy and understanding.

Did you see Lucille? No. Yes. Lucille was everywhere, but we did not speak.

I wanted to double-check with you that your mailing address is still the same as the one you sent us back in April? If you're a college student I know address changes are really common at this time of year!

Giant miseries and giant hopes can carry on their wars in the merest cranny.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

There is a genius for impoverishment always at work in the world. And it has its way, as if its proceedings were not only necessary but even sensible. Its rationale, its battle cry, is Competition

I felt just the way I imagine the shade of poor old Samuel must have felt when the witch dragged him up from Sheol. Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up? In fact, I had spent the morning darkness praying for the wisdom to do well by John Ames Boughton, and then when he woke me, I was immediately aware that my sullen old reptilian self would have handed him over to the Philistines for the sake of a few more minutes' sleep.

Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes--old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam's ass, it's seen the angel I haven't seen yet, and it's lying down in the path.

Memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.

there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord's judgment when we decide to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God.

In America, since we are an immigrant country, our "nativists" may be first- or second-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents were themselves considered suspect on these same grounds. It is almost as interesting as it is disheartening to learn that nativist rhetoric can have impact in a country where precious few can claim to be native in any ordinary sense.

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.

In those days there was a lot of pride involved in the way a woman's wash looked, especially the white things.

the worst misfortune isn't only misfortune

me! I'll just say—what am I going to say? The house will smell like

there's no pleasure in work if you don't break a sweat. Out in the fields you feel any little breeze. You know it's coming, you hear it in the trees, you almost can't wait for it, and then there it is, like a cold drink of water.

It could be true that my interest in abstractions, which would have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of senility

309Knee-high by the Fourth of July. So it must be June. Every farmhouse in its cloud of trees. There is a way trees stir before a rain, as if they already felt the heaviness. It all just went on and on, the United States of America. It was so easy to forget that most of the world was cornfields.

Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes - old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just as remarkable.

There were times in his youth when his imaginations of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial. These impulses—they were not temptations—had quieted over the years. But the realization startled him when he recognized the fantasy he had allowed himself was actually identical with the desolation intended for

I'm grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

Trees sound different at night, and they smell different too.

As you read this, I hope you will understand that when I speak of the long night that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort—grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.