Marilynne Robinson Quotes - Page 2

We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.

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

God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.

... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

Grace has a grand laughter in it.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.

...not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.

We have demythologized prematurely, that we've actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

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 loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.

Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.

I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.

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