Jack Quotes

“I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don’t do that. In your own way, you’re kind of—pure.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“...feeling that old thrill of dread and compulsion, he knew circumstances had once again put him too close to a fragile thing. He said, "Look at the life we live, Della. I have to sneak over here in the dark just to steal a few words with you. Is that language, or is it noise?"

She said, "It's noise that you have to do it, and language that you do it, anyway." She said softly, "Maybe poetry.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“We do. We know this, but just because it’s a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Forever after, the thought of her would be painful, because it had been pleasant. Strange how that is.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“After a while she said, "If you make a sound it's just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it's a word. It means something. It can't not mean something.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Those who can't hope can still wish.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“He was waiting to see what she would make of him, as they say. And then he would be what she made of him.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“So many of earth's grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Cleverness has a special piquancy when it blooms out of the fraying sleeve of failure.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another. Everybody is vulnerable. It’s kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Sometimes I feel like we’ve just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That’s how it would seem to us when we looked back.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“An intensely lonely man for whom life has not gone well - I believe this was your language.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Meaningless would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“I sometimes think the lord might enjoy a few lines of poetry.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“... how can one human being mean so much to another human being in terms of peace and assurance, as if loyalty were as real as gravity.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn’t even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“An intensely lonely man for whom life had not gone well - I believe this was your language.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“That's how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“When defects of character are your character, you become a what.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“I’m a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“...and that was the whole story, but it always made them laugh. 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.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“There were times in his youth when his imaginations of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial. These impulses—they were not temptations—had quieted over the years. But the realization startled him when he recognized the fantasy he had allowed himself was actually identical with the desolation intended for”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“It was probably best just to be quiet and wait until the conversation changed, as conversations will when no one is saying anything.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“When did he first notice that in himself, that little fascination with damage and its consequences? He might alarm her. He might mean to alarm her. Doing damage to this fragile night because it was such an isolated thing, an accident, with a look of meaning about it and no meaning at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly didn’t want to have.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“She said, “meaninglessness would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn’t be meaningless. That’s where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can’t get away from it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Buildings dream at night, and their dreams have a particular character. Or perhaps at night they awaken. There is nothing cordial or accommodating about buildings, whatever they might let people believe. The stresses of simply standing there, preposterous constructions, Euclidian like nothing in nature, the ground heaving under them, rain seeping in while their joints go slack with rot. They speak disgruntlement, creaks and groans, and less nameable sounds that suggest presence of the kind that is conjured only by emptiness. Grudges, plaints, and threats, an interior conversation, not meant to be heard, that would startle anyone. Jack had never realized before that the city, the parts he knew of it, might despise its human infestation.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack