Marilynne Robinson Quotes

This was real. And it was me. I had lived that life, and I had died that death. I was staring at the very end of me.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

My dad died of a heart attack when I was 15. I was bullied mercilessly in middle school. I went through a divorce - those not-so-great things are all a part of me, and they give me a place to go when I cover those stories on the news. I'm more empathetic, more relatable because of them.

Me, I'm not a guy who's dealt with a lot of death in my life, so when it hits you, it hits hard, you question different things.

The two most mysterious things in our lives are birth and death. They are both miraculous events; one brings shiny, brand new life into the world, and the other snuffs it out like that. That person isn't there anymore.

My father passed away when I was 18. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it is not like that all the time. Not every moment is dark.

I lost my father when I was 19, so the majority of my life has been under this cloud, and I have been full of the intention to find out what happened.

My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.

The world is not outside you.

If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?

To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

An act of evil is the death of wonder

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

God wasn't love, couldn't be love. Because for me, love was a corpse.

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

How do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

When you suffer a loss, there is before the death and after the death - those become your two existences and your two realities.