Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord's compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.

I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don't do that. In your own way, you're kind of—pure.

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?

To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

I believe the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don't have.

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted.

I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. p. 208

This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

It seems as though the conclusions are never as interesting as the questions. I mean, they're not what you remember.

feeling that old thrill of dread and compulsion, he knew circumstances had once again put him too close to a fragile thing. He said, Look at the life we live, Della. I have to sneak over here in the dark just to steal a few words with you. Is that language, or is it noise? She said, It's noise that you have to do it, and language that you do it, anyway. She said softly, Maybe poetry.

She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn't any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same.

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things

I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time

I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me...

Children seem to think that every pleasant thing has to be a surprise.

That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.

We would have visions in those days,a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams

And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them proofs. I just won't do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said a out God from a posture of defense.

We are culturally predisposed to sheltering criticism from criticism; we have enshrined the iconoclast

You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea...You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were.

The night was windy, full of tree sounds. The moon was gone and there was rain, so fine that it was only a tingle on the skin.

Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.

My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance