620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace.

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

I think that in our earlier history--the Gettysburg Address or something--there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them.

How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.

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