Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

She closed one eye and looked at me and said, I know there is a blessing in this somewhere. It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is... So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.

Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.

not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.

If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don't hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.

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

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

Light is constant, we just turn over in it.

When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.

My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same.

Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.

When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.

That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.

I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that.