Erin Loechner > Erin's Quotes

“When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I used to think the opposite of control was chaos. But it's not. The opposite of control is surrender.”
― Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path

“Grace is giving yourself a free pass and realizing that it isn't free at all.”
― Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path

“We are doing ourselves no favors when we look to the crowd to tell us where we are.”
― Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path

“The heart of a woman is the best mirror you can find.”
― Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path

“I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the "now," year after year.”
― Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York

“I do not know that everything happens for a reason. I simply know that everything happens.”
― Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“She knew better than to waste that time. There isn't always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you're being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was little enough to carry, she could hardly bring herself to put him down.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Lila

“I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I am saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment”
― Marilynne Robinson

“For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
― Marilynne Robinson

“Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools' errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

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

“Cranky old Leviticus gave us—gave Christ—not only “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” but also the rather forgotten “Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself,” two verses that appear to be merged in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays

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

“We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“i have thought about that very often - how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“What better reminder do we have than our kids of our own best selves, our less stressed and more carefree selves? In their silliness we see the echo of the way we used to be: when we were kids, yes, but also before we had kids, or even two weeks ago, before all of the stress of these year-end corporate meetings. Their joy, their infectious enthusiasm, their sense of "mission" as the poor dog is dressed in boxer shorts, cannot help but cajole you, and beckon you, to lighten up.”
― Kim John Payne, Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year