Marilynne Robinson citations

Page 2

“qu'arriverait-il si l'homme qui prétendait être son mari se détournait de Lila? Rien. Et s'il n'y avait finalement pas d'enfant? Il y aurait un soir et un matin. Le silence du monde lui faisait aussi mal que s'il se moquait ouvertement d'elle.”

“Vous ne pouvez jamais savoir quand vous voyez quelqu'un pour la dernière fois.”

“C'était à la fois une source de terreur et de confort pour moi que de paraître souvent invisible - que d'exister, en fait, d'une manière incomplète et minimale. J'avais l'impression de n'avoir aucun impact sur le monde, et d'avoir, en échange, le privilège de l'observer à son insu. Mais mon allusion à cette sensation d'existence spectrale eut une résonance particulière, et la sueur me couvrit tout le corps, me convainquant sur-le-champ de ma grossière existence corporelle.”

“Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

“It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.”

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

“There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

“I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.”

“I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.”

“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.”

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

“It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”

“… if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.”

“I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge " because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.”

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting… By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

“I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.


I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.”

“He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required”

“… not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.”

“She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere."

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.”

“Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, "Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.”

“… there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.”