620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you’re just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.

I don’t know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries.

You best keep to yourself, except you never can.

She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.

My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places.

Musing thus, she set out upon on her widowhood, and became altogether as good a widow as she had been a wife.