620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

After a while she said, “If you make a sound it’s just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it’s a word. It means something. It can’t not mean something.

Let us say, as a thought experiment, that someone in a country equipped with doomsday weapons fears attack from another country and strikes preemptively. There would be thousands of years of cultural history and some few decades of personal history behind the decision. Madman though he might be, he would have brought the species to a culmination that humankind had been preparing for eons. To say that a spasm of activity in a region of his brain was crucial to the event would be utterly trivial.

I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it.

I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.

Any good thing is less good the more any human being lays claim to it.

These little towns were once the bold ramparts meant to shelter just such peace.

The furtive closing of a door is a sound the wind can make a dozen times in an hour. A flow of damp air from the lake can make any house feel empty. Such currents pull one’s dreams after them, and one’s own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things.

It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?

In eternity people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either.