Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

This came to my mind because remembering and forgiving can be contrary things.

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You felt that you are with someone

And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loved them and won't buy them for herself.

we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations

I suspect Scottishness is another name for predestination. It explains everything, more or less.

There is a tendency among some religious people even to invite ridicule and bring down on themselves and intellectual content which seems to me in some cases justified. 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.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

Sometimes they cried out at night, small thin cries that never woke them. The sound would stop as she started up the stairs, however softly, and when she reached their rooms she would find them all quietly asleep, the source of the cry hiding in silence, like a cricket. Just her coming was enough to still the creature.

It offends my conscience to bear witness against him.

He told me once that being blessed meant being bloodied, and that is true etymologically, in English - but not in Greek or Hebrew. So whatever understanding might be based on that derivation has no scriptural authority behind it. It was unlike him to strain interpretation that way. He did it in order to make an account of himself, I suppose, as most of us do.

I can tell you this, that if I'd married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they each had given me ten grandchildren, I'd leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face, your mother's face. And if I never found you, my comfort would be in that hope, my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord

would come to me and ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something.

I do hope to die with a quiet heart . I know that may not be realistic.

Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

Tant que tu ne veux pas ce dont tu n'as pas besoin, tout ira bien. Tant que tu ne veux pas ce que tu ne peux pas obtenir.

And on that walk he said to me, John, you might as well know now what you're sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater - you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance.

I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.

qu'arriverait-il si l'homme qui prétendait être son mari se détournait de Lila? Rien. Et s'il n'y avait finalement pas d'enfant? Il y aurait un soir et un matin. Le silence du monde lui faisait aussi mal que s'il se moquait ouvertement d'elle.

The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency.

There's a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of Mother and Father.

I had a dream once that I was preaching to Jesus Himself, saying any foolish thing I could think of, and He was sitting there in His white, white robe looking patient and sad and amazed.

I don't write the way I speak. I'm afraid you would think I didn't know any better. I don't write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.

I really despise the pathos of being found asleep at odd times in odd places.

Religion could quiet our antagonisms if we let it be what it is fundamentally and at best.