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"So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensational."
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"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
"Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit."
"Marriage creates one world for your child. For that alone, two old friends can try to see a peaceful world through the eyes of their angels."
"Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday? I roll my eyes. "I don't know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback. "I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party. He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. "And I'm not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks. "What's an acid flashback? Izzy crows. "Nothing, my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me."
"...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues."
"My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought."
"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing."
"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."
"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
"Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."
"I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it."
"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."
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