Marilynne Robinson Quotes

“My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew...”

″...over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me blindingly beautiful. And it was.”

“He had said the very last word he would have applied to war, once he had had a good look at it, was “purifying,” and the thought that those women could believe the world was any way purer for the loss of their own sons and husbands was appalling to him.”

″...that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could fall away like a dry husk.”

“I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for its existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly.”

“I believe that the plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.”

“I don’t forgive him. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.”

“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. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it.”