Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

But the child just lay against her, hoping to stay where she was, hoping the rain wouldn't end. Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they couldn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

The feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality, a sense that the world cannot at all be accounted for in its own terms, is a profound bond and understanding between and among religious people.

The broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global

At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is.

an old pastor's anxiety for his church is likewise a forgetfulness of the fact that Christ is Himself the pastor of His people and a faithful presence among them through all generations.

There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all.

My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience.

as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

The concept of the soul is the profoundest possible bond among us, an unshakable basis for compassion, recognition, and love, which, acknowledged, would enable us to love enemies, welcome strangers, and all the rest.

Beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality, and we are an essential part of it, bringing to it our singular gifts of reflection and creation.

He had learned that determination is suspect, more so as more effort is involved in it.

We take fortuitous resemblances 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.

At the same time that we rejected the conception of a God who could be called loving or passionate, we ceased to attend to like qualities in ourselves.

Conscience can be slow to awake, even to abuses that are deeply contrary to declared values—for example, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if conscience is at peace with such things, if it rationalizes and endorses them, does it still possess an authority that justifies its expression, since acceptance is as much an act of conscience as resistance

Americans' treatment of the Negro indicated a lack of religious seriousness.

the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought.

A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider. I

it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.

The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask 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. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spare the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing.

John Calvin says that when a seed falls into the ground it is cherished there, by which he means that everything the seed contains by way of expectation is foreseen and honored. One might as well say the earth invades the seed, seizes it as occasion to compose itself in some brief shape... So a thriving place is full of intention, a sufficiency awaiting expectation, teasing beyond hope itself.

Whenever he put his fingers into it, it rattled with the trembling of his hand, and the sound was just like the sound of fire. I noticed this at the time and it seemed natural to me. I more or less assumed that the thunder and lightning were Creation tipping its hat to him as if to say, Glad to see you in the stands, Reverend, or maybe it said, Why Reverend, what in this grieving world are you doing here at a sporting event?