"If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn't understand what it was that made ...
How I wish you could have known me in my strength.
~ Marilynne Robinson ~
More Marilynne Robinson quotes
"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 recognized for what i...
"...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselve...
"I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.
"There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
"But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.
"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.
"Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculab...
"Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it wa...
"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 t...
"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that ...
"Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
"It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the...
"I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in...