What Are We Doing Here? Quotes

“A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“A theology for our time should help us to know that Being is indeed the theater of God's glory, and that, within it, we have a terrible privilege, a capacity for profound error and grave harm. We might venture an answer to God's question, Where were you when I created—? We were there, potential and implicit and by the grace of God inevitable, more unstoppable than the sea, impervious than Leviathan, in that deep womb of time almost hearing the sons of God when they shouted for joy. And we are here, your still-forming child, still opening our eyes on a reality whose astonishments we can never exhaust.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, according to the epistle of James. But we have lived for years with the raucous influence of self-declared Christians who are clearly convinced that their wrath and God's righteousness are one and the same.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?: Essays

“Perhaps the worst thing about ideological thinking is that it implies a structure in and behind events, a history that is reiterative, with variations that cannot ultimately change the course of things and are therefore always trivial, no matter how much thought and labor goes into the making of them.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking—that is, in thinking that by definition is not one's own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted—is a capitulation no one should ever make.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“While the Citizen can entertain aspirations for the society as a whole and take pride in its achievements, the Taxpayer, as presently imagined, simply does not want to pay taxes. The societal consequences of this aversion--failing infrastructure, for example--are to be preferred to any inroad on his or her momentary fiefdom.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“I talked once with a cabdriver who had spent years in prison. He said he had no idea that the world was something he could be interested in. And then he read a book.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What are We Doing Here?

“only theology supports an ultimate coherency that can embrace equally the true, the tentative, and the flawed, as reality itself embraces them—”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality, and we are an essential part of it, bringing to it our singular gifts of reflection and creation.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“The concept of the soul is the profoundest possible bond among us, an unshakable basis for compassion, recognition, and love, which, acknowledged, would enable us to love enemies, welcome strangers, and all the rest.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“The feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality, a sense that the world cannot at all be accounted for in its own terms, is a profound bond and understanding between and among religious people.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Religion could quiet our antagonisms if we let it be what it is fundamentally and at best.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“We can feel deficiency in what we know or do, we can hear inadequacy in our most painfully considered phrases. And gracious and chimerical beauty will bless us with the certainty that there is more to be hoped for, more to be tried.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Indeed, unread books may govern the world, not well, since they so often are taken to justify our worst impulses and prejudices. The Holy Bible is a case in point”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Ideological thinking - that is in thinking that is by definition not one's own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted - is a capitulation no one should ever make. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“If physics and cosmology are truly sciences, then there exists a body of excellent evidence that the scale and the varieties of Being vastly exceed anything an earlier generation could have imagined. This persuades me that reasoning about ultimate things cannot be based on the anomalous fragment of reality accessible to our awareness.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“God’s grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we could extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to cost-benefit analysis. This is not the consequence of a new atheism or a systemic materialism that afflicts our age more than others. It is good old human meanness, which finds its terms and pretexts in every age. The best argument against human grandeur is the meagerness of our response to it, paradoxically enough.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“We are part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things--justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, and have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Many teachers in the humanities have treated it as true that this country was always fundamentally capitalist, intending the word to mean more or less what they think Karl Marx intended by it. In 99.5 percent of cases they have never read a page of Marx, so they have no idea what he was describing.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“In America, since we are an immigrant country, our “nativists” may be first- or second-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents were themselves considered suspect on these same grounds. It is almost as interesting as it is disheartening to learn that nativist rhetoric can have impact in a country where precious few can claim to be native in any ordinary sense.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“There is a genius for impoverishment always at work in the world. And it has its way, as if its proceedings were not only necessary but even sensible. Its rationale, its battle cry, is Competition”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“Conscience can be slow to awake, even to abuses that are deeply contrary to declared values—for example, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if conscience is at peace with such things, if it rationalizes and endorses them, does it still possess an authority that justifies its expression, since acceptance is as much an act of conscience as resistance”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“The truth about Obama's birthplace or Trump's relationship with Russia will never be established to the satisfaction of everyone, but Christians know truth of another order, that human beings are created in the image of God. They are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights--that is, unalienable claims on our respect. This is the truth that has made us free.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“When people feel they know who to blame or to snicker at, they seldom feel the need to know more.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“God's grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts if they really deserve the name, would stand up to cost-benefit analysis.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?

“At this time the country needs to regain equilibrium and direction. It needs to recover the memory of the best it has done, and then try to do it all better.”
― Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?