Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

“There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

“If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the...”

“My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just qu...”

“The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. ...”

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

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

“I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any ...”

“That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell ...”

“You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, t...”

“My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in i...”

“I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was li...”

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

“There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that ...”

“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”

“It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.[E]very memory is turned over and ...”

“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?”

“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 incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the ...”

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in ex...”

“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 it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very ...”

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient”