"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 i...

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 second view.
~ Marilynne Robinson ~












Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are eith...
Show MoreMore Marilynne Robinson quotes
"There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
"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 salien...
"I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called rac...
"Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it wa...
"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that ...
"His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soap...
"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 tr...
"I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
"It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.
"How I wish you could have known me in my strength.
"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 ...
"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
"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.