Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

“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.”

“There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welco...”

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

“Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Conte...”

“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.”

“I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal love...”

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

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

“I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alon...”

“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.”

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibilit...”

“remembering and forgiving can be contrary things”

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibilit...”

“When you encounter another personit 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? If you confront insult or antagonism...”

“For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to t...”

“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.”

“No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, "I was hungry and you fed ...”

“I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some v...”

“You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.”

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