Top 100 Marilynne Robinson Quotes

#1. The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #253
#2. I knew perfectly well at the time, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #15037
#3. 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

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #40417
#4. I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preoisterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #62683
#5. When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, "I was hungry, and ye fed me not" (Matthew 25:42).

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #62930
#6. The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #87180
#7. Since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #110435
#8. We would have visions in those days,a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #133502
#9. She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere."
It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #178158
#10. In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you're pretty.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #182290
#11. The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #183179
#12. I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #183844
#13. It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #187127
#14. If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #189479
#15. Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #211005
#16. When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #222700
#17. You're right not to talk. It's a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there's no telling what you'll say.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #246927
#18. She'd thought the world was just hayfields and cornfields and and bean fields and apple orchards. The people who owned them and the people who didn't.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #262057
#19. Lila had no particular notion of what the word 'married' meant, except that there was an endless, pleasant joke between them that excluded everybody else and that all the rest of them were welcome to admire.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #302663
#20. More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #329871
#21. Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #345668
#22. It is true for everyone that the experience that society gives to us, or denies us, is profoundly formative.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #364514
#23. Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #379961
#24. Nothing can account for the reductionist tendencies among neuroscientists except a lack of rigor and consistency, a loyalty to conclusions that are prior to evidence and argument, and an indifference to science as a whole.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #459130
#25. Morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #474356
#26. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.
-Imagination & Community

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #475781
#27. I could probably not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #495718
#28. There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #511666
#29. So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #519949
#30. It's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #528748
#31. Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would sound very sad, and it wasn't, really.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #606866
#32. Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #615193
#33. The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #663269
#34. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #683329
#35. One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #733447
#36. Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthiritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #780687
#37. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #822257
#38. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #827570
#39. And there I was, trudging through the same old nowhere, day after day, always wanting to slow down, to sit down, to lie down, with my father walking on ahead, no doubt a little desperate, as he had every right to be.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #834220
#40. A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #851612
#41. Thinking that we know more than we do, therefore rejecting what we are given as experience, blinds us to our ignorance, which is the deep darkness where truth abides. And our wealth of ignorance grows and multiplies. Much

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #875085
#42. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #891975
#43. I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #933751
#44. There is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #943808
#45. There's no pleasure in work if you don't break a sweat. Out in the fields you feel any little breeze. You know it's coming, you hear it in the trees, you almost can't wait for it, and then there it is, like a cold drink of water.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #956030
#46. The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #957004
#47. Walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world - what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1045230
#48. 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

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1104058
#49. Chimerical grief - now guilt, now blame, now the thought that it could all have been otherwise. ~ Glory

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1112405
#50. Nothing could be more miraculous than the fact that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and are moved by what is beautiful.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1136090
#51. Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1152179
#52. It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1158234
#53. It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1169466
#54. I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1188985
#55. There is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the innocence of children.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1193622
#56. It was another cabin with a stoop, and a dooryard beaten bare.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1206989
#57. When you're scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it's kindly meant. Now

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1223208
#58. Pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1239229
#59. Grant me on earth what seems Thee best, Till death and Heav'n reveal the rest. - Isaac Watts

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1266614
#60. Any good thing is less good the more any human being lays claim to it.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1267999
#61. Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word:Read.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1272535
#62. The word "preacher" comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1289806
#63. It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1297819
#64. My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1298834
#65. The physical body can crave sleep with an animal greed, as everybody knows. Then it is snappish when it is disturbed, as I would have been if I hadn't had the memory, at least, of praying for tranquillity.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1320226
#66. The fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1321241
#67. My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1361584
#68. And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them proofs. I just won't do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said a out God from a posture of defense.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1398311
#69. I find that the hardest work in the world ... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1399872
#70. And here is a prejudice of mine, confirmed by my lights through many years of observation. Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1414490
#71. The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1419098
#72. You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1420694
#73. She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1421256
#74. It is hardship that makes clear who the "fighters" are.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1435839
#75. I can't love you as much as I love you. I can't feel as happy as I am." ... "Were you as sad as you were sad? As lonely as you were lonely? I wasn't." "Me neither. I would have died of it.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1452272
#76. Good fortune is not only good fortune, and over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me to be blindingly beautiful. And it was.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1461859
#77. Oh, I am a limited man, and old, and he will still be his inexplicable mortal self when I am dust.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1468302
#78. I read things like theology, and I read about science, 'Scientific American' and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1504114
#79. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1510604
#80. I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1575836
#81. There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1579707
#82. I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1614408
#83. If we focused on using the opportunities we have, which are very great by any standard - health, longevity, comfort and privacy, endless resources of culture and information - we would not just navigate this world, we would leave a good inheritance to succeeding generations.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1626956
#84. I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1660842
#85. When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1675207
#86. 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

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1697418
#87. Would come to me and ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1699798
#88. My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1716711
#89. Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. So I don't want to encourage anyone else to think that way either.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1722743
#90. The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1735466
#91. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1753725
#92. Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1781712
#93. I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge " because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1785881
#94. 309Knee-high by the Fourth of July. So it must be June. Every farmhouse in its cloud of trees. There is a way trees stir before a rain, as if they already felt the heaviness. It all just went on and on, the United States of America. It was so easy to forget that most of the world was cornfields.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1809873
#95. The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within ... Nothing is more essential to us.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1833601
#96. Clean and acceptable. It would be something to know what that felt like, even for an hour or two.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1835839
#97. Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1846100
#98. If you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1875632
#99. Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1876201
#100. These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes #1878951

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