Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

Theres so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.

When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.

I felt, as I have often felt, that my failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself, which could never conceivably be in any sense dependent on me or on anyone.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when its gone, its like theres nothing left of you at all . . . except what you cant be rid of.

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

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.

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? ... This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate.

I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is Gods good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.

Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.

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 didnt 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.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course hes right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146)

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

i know more than i know and must learn it from myself

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