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"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."
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"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity."
"Murphy watched me thoughtfully for several empty seconds. Then she said, very gently, "You're a good man, Harry."I swallowed and bowed my head, made humble by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face, more than the words themselves.Not always rational," she said, smiling. "But you're the best kind of crazy."
"A poet warrior realizes both the brutality and the beauty in life, and apprehends that the suffering we tragically endure is partly what makes us human. What also makes us human is the ability to love, the ability to stand in nature's presence, and to nurture this earthly paradise to tend to our family's needs."
"Instead of narrowing our allegiances to only include our favored nation, let us sing an anthem to the marvelous human being."
"We are creatures taken seriously by the Earth, because we can severely affect the fate of the Earth, but we are in no way taken seriously by the Universe yet!"
"Humility is one of the best expressions of self respect."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"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."
"She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse."
"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."
"I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low."
"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."
"She knew there were words so terrible you heard them with your whole body. Guilty. And there were voices to say them. She knew there were people you might almost trust who would hear them, too, and be amazed, and still not really hear them because they know they were not the ones the words were spoken to."
"We are supposed to believe [capitalist ideology] was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. If there was such a champion, might it not have been freedom itself, as realized in the institutional forms of democracy? This is not how the story has been told. We are t believe it was an economic system, capitalism, that arrayed its forces against its opposite, communism, and rescued all we hold dear. Yet in the new era... [capitalism] has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment, and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens."
"This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy."
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