#marilynne robinson quote

[introvertlifestyle]

I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.

Marilynne Robinson (American writer, *1943)

[quotespile]

A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The River at Ascutney, 1942 Maxfield Parrish

* * * *

Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon. My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”

from "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson

[exhaled-spirals]

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

[litsnaps]

[mythologyofblue]

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” ― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

[quotessentially]

From Marilynne Robinson’s Home

[elwenyere]

“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”

-- Marilynne Robinson, from Gilead

[philosophybitmaps]

[theinwardlight]

From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

[yetwewillmakehimrun]

“The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.”

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

[diaryoftruequotes]

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

[quotespile]

We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth in all its variety because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe.

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia North Carolina :: (beautiful North Carolina)

* * * *

Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair. We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them. Finally Boughton said, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don’t know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since.

from "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson

[authorstalker]

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

[litsnaps]