Marilynne Robinson Quotes

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.

We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself.

It's better to have nothing, ' the children were saying.

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.

When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.

We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth in all its variety because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe.

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.

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

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

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.

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

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

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things

She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

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

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.

He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn't even know he wanted, and here it was.

The word "preacher" comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.

...when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.

Avoid transgression. How's that for advice.

There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them.

The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.

...morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

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

I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal.

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.

I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.

Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools' errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.

Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought.

Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...

In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?

If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn't have to worry about any of this.