Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view. - Marilynne Robinson
We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself. - Marilynne Robinson
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art. - Marilynne Robinson
I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally. - Marilynne Robinson
But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it. - Marilynne Robinson
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. - Marilynne Robinson
When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists. - Marilynne Robinson
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact. - Marilynne Robinson
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. - Marilynne Robinson
She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished. - Marilynne Robinson
There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient - Marilynne Robinson
Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view. - Marilynne Robinson
...when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly. - Marilynne Robinson
There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. - Marilynne Robinson
And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they couldn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. - Marilynne Robinson