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Author: Marilynne Robinson
Quotes of Author: Marilynne Robinson
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  1. Marilynne Robinson _ Gilead

    To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light {which is their mortification and their reward}, and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubborness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints." Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
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  2. Marilynne Robinson _ Gilead

    It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
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  3. Marilynne Robinson _ Home

    That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
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  4. Marilynne Robinson _ Gilead

    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.
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  5. Marilynne Robinson _ Housekeeping

    Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.
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  6. Marilynne Robinson _ Home

    What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.
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  7. Marilynne Robinson _ The Death of Adam: Essays on

    I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.
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  8. Marilynne Robinson _ Housekeeping

    I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.
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  9. Marilynne Robinson _ Lila

    My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same.
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  10. Marilynne Robinson _ Gilead

    Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.
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  11. Marilynne Robinson _ Housekeeping

    She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.
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  12. Marilynne Robinson _ Gilead

    When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.
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