Home Quotes

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

“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.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in this flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Prayer is a discipline in truthfulness, in honesty.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord's compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Why should a family with eight rambunctious children bother owning anything that could be damaged? They sat on the arms of their mother's overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they hung over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father's house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole like has come down to this moment.
That he has answered his father's prayers.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“It seems as though the conclusions are never as interesting as the questions. I mean, they’re not what you remember.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“That's what the family is for,' he said. 'Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it. As if it came from the Lord Himself. Which it does. So I want you boys to promise me that you will help each other.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It certainly did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She was afraid to be angry and that made her angry.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other. Ames”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You must forgive in order to understand.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You never bother me, Glory. It's remarkable how much you don't bother me. Almost unprecedented.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“The young might have been restless around any primal fire where an elder was saying, Know this. Certainly they would have been restless. Their bodies were consumed with the business of lengthening limbs, sprouting hair, fitting themselves for procreation.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Her father told his children to pray for patience, for courage, for kindness, for clarity, for trust, for gratitude. Those prayers will be answered,”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh,”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn’t such a villain after all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home