Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping (1980)

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A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.

Marilynne Robinson
Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.

Marilynne Robinson
It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.

Marilynne Robinson
He [Christ] even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him — a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.

Marilynne Robinson
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

Marilynne Robinson
Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

Marilynne Robinson
Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Marilynne Robinson
For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings.

Marilynne Robinson
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

Marilynne Robinson
And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.

Marilynne Robinson
Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

Marilynne Robinson
She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.

Marilynne Robinson
Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

Marilynne Robinson
Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.

Marilynne Robinson
When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.

Marilynne Robinson
You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.

Marilynne Robinson
Pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.

Marilynne Robinson
Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

Marilynne Robinson