01UndatedTo 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 taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
02UndatedFor 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 taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
03UndatedShe 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.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
04UndatedThe broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and globalMarilynne Robinson / quote ↗
05UndatedI 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.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
06UndatedI believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
08UndatedNo 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 me. I was naked and you clothed me." This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God's compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
09UndatedHe looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn't even know he wanted, and here it was.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
10UndatedThere 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.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
11UndatedThe 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 postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill -- all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
12UndatedBecause, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
13UndatedI 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 kind of proximity.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
14UndatedThat'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 the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
15UndatedYou 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, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed--that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in a book, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying. Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever been otherwise. Loneliness is absolute discovery.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
16UndatedMy 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 its least bearable forms.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
17UndatedI'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 like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
18UndatedThe 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?Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
19UndatedSay 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 second view.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
20UndatedThere are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficientMarilynne Robinson / quote ↗
22Undated...when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
24UndatedIt is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.Marilynne Robinson / quote ↗
