"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...

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.
~ Marilynne Robinson ~












Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three w...
Show MoreMore Marilynne Robinson quotes
"There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
"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 incalculab...
"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...
"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.
"Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and a...
"Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbein...
"Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the l...