620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.

Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

You’re right not to talk. It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous – dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

The best things that happen I’d never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.

Some dogs bite. So you keep them away from people. You can’t just get rid of them, for being the way they are. And now and then you can be glad to have them around, to snarl the way a good dog never does.

Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.

Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of a thought.

It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.