Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine.

She said, "I don't know why I come here. That's a fact." He shrugged. "Since you are here, maybe you could tell me a little about yourself?" She shook her head. "I don't talk about that. I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do." "Oh!" he said. "Then I'm glad you have some time to spare. I've been wondering about that more or less my whole life.

That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.

I can't love you as much as I love you. I can't feel as happy as I am....Were you as sad as you were sad? As lonely as you were lonely? I wasn't. Me neither. I would have died of it.

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.

So my advice is this—don't look for proofs. Don't bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they're always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them.

Prayer is a discipline in truthfulness, in honesty.

How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.

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. There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience

But I believe also the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always a sense of the sacredness of the person who is the object... When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself.

The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact.

A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.

All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.

There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannon be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.

It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.

There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

It's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night.