Laura Housley > Laura's Quotes

“There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“As the family weakens, our welfare and correctional bureaucracies grow.”
― Sherif Girgis, What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense

“Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“The prayers of all good people are good.”
― Willa Cather, My Antonia / O Pioneers!

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Neither of them had any particular longing for material wealth except as it would aid them in this life’s work of parental responsibility. In their eyes it was far more important that each of their children grow up to be noted for honesty and integrity than that any one of them should make a mark in the world. Both worked unceasingly all the days of their lives and taught their children to love work.” 4”
― Dallin H. Oaks, Life's Lessons Learned: Personal Reflections

“It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Lila

“When I am feeling dreary, annoyed and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look – the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that bother me? It’s so… endearing.”
― Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

“My brother, who grew up with three sisters, was I won't say how many years old when he finally realized that he did not have to wrap the towel around his chest when he came out of the shower.”
― Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

“If you really love someone, you want to know what they ate for lunch or dinner without you.”
― Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

“Work must reflect the randomness of life, with its incessant, merciless, almost humorous bombardment of highly contrasting emotions and experiences.”
― Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life