top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Relationship quotes
"The more you are able to forgive then the more you are able to love."
"If you take a stand [for God] and mean it, you may suffer persecution. Some of your friends will drift away. They don't want to be with people like you. You speak to their conscience. They feel uncomfortable in your presence because you live for God."
"Love is such a tremendous force of feeling! When you can't stop loving, you simply cannot stop it."
"For few matters you need to be solo, for some matters you need soul mate and for many matters you need society."
"Our relationship must be right with God before it can be right with man."
"Was Deirdre right about me purposely wanting relationships that were impossible?"
"Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal."
"Go! Yes, You! Go! I will not force you to like me; I will not force you to love me. Unconditional love has a condition inside it but there is no you in me. If I know my real me, then I know your real you. I know your value in me and I also know my value in you. If your value is not in me and my value is not in you, then I will not force you to like me; I will not force you to love me, so go!"
"Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn't splash back on us."
"When you forgive, you are freed from some of the feelings of disapproval and it can contribute to lessening your negative thoughts."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"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."
"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."
bottom of page