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"I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."
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Exlpore more Observation quotes
"People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it."
"I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn't squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn't even blink."
"The whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough."
"Most people spend less time outside than prisoners."
"The Republic's most wanted criminal is just a boy, sitting before me, suddenly vulnerable, laying all his weaknesses out for me to see."
"I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too."
"Snap your fingerstop the world - rain falls harder."
"His eyes said what I cannot see."
"New Englanders could be so brusque."
"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"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?"
"Any father must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness."
"The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spare the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing."
"I have mentioned the qualitative difference between Christianity as an ethic and Christianity as an identity. Christian ethics goes steadfastly against the grain of what we consider human nature: the first will be last, to him who asks give, turn the other cheek, judge not. Identity on the other hand appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses. It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous "us on one side and on the other a "them who are very doubtful indeed, who are in fact a threat to all we hold dear."
"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet."
"Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all..."
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