Top 100 Marilynne Robinson Quotes
#1. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Dinaw Mengestu
#2. I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.
Phil Klay
#3. 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
#4. Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being - for those who create and master them, at least. Now
Marilynne Robinson
#5. To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear
Marilynne Robinson
#6. I doubt that I could create a character I loathed simply because when a character takes life, it is impossible not to be a little amazed by the phenomenon, and to find that the amazement has something of the quality of delight.
Marilynne Robinson
#7. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
Marilynne Robinson
#8. 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
#9. And now they say my heart is failing. The doctor used the term "angina pectoris," which has a theological sound, like misericordia.
Marilynne Robinson
#10. I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing.
Marilynne Robinson
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil.
Marilynne Robinson
#15. Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
Marilynne Robinson
#16. I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.
Marilynne Robinson
#17. 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
#18. Doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief.
Marilynne Robinson
#19. My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.
Marilynne Robinson
#20. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
Marilynne Robinson
#21. I am in a state of categorical unbelief. I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean. (Jack Boughton)
Marilynne Robinson
#22. Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
Marilynne Robinson
#23. She pretended he knew some of her thoughts, only some of them, the ones she would like to show him.
Marilynne Robinson
#24. 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
#25. I have spent years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of . . . people who do not exist.
Marilynne Robinson
#26. Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for us as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.
Marilynne Robinson
#27. 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
#28. I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.
Marilynne Robinson
#29. A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
Marilynne Robinson
#30. Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.
Marilynne Robinson
#32. 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
#33. If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn't have to worry about any of this.
Marilynne Robinson
#34. Love is holy because it is like grace
the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
Marilynne Robinson
#35. 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
#36. Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.
Marilynne Robinson
#37. I've probably been boring a lot of people for a long time. Strange to find comfort in the idea. There have always been things I felt I must tell them, even if no one listened or understood.
Marilynne Robinson
#38. I remember when I was a child ... walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle.
Marilynne Robinson
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
Marilynne Robinson
#43. Lila never knew people could be so mean. She was mean, too, because the sadness in that house was like a dream that made everything strange and wrong.
Marilynne Robinson
#44. It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
Marilynne Robinson
#45. 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
#46. The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light ... It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.
Marilynne Robinson
#47. Her father was soothed by these attentions, as if pain were an appetite for comforting of just this kind.
Marilynne Robinson
#48. It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.
Marilynne Robinson
#49. 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
#50. Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.
Marilynne Robinson
#51. My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places.
Marilynne Robinson
#52. 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
#53. Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.
Marilynne Robinson
#54. Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.
Marilynne Robinson
#55. Well, he says, basically, that people have to suffer to really recognize grace when it comes. I
Marilynne Robinson
#56. A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.
Marilynne Robinson
#57. She thought, If I'm crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.
Marilynne Robinson
#58. 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
#59. His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing.
Marilynne Robinson
#60. I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
Marilynne Robinson
#61. It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.
Marilynne Robinson
#62. Some dogs bite. So you keep them away from people. You can't just get rid of them, for being the way they are. And now and then you can be glad to have them around, to snarl the way a good dog never does.
Marilynne Robinson
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn't any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same.
Marilynne Robinson
#66. They left a trail of hopscotch behind them, Mellie always thinking of ways to make it harder. They'd be jumping along in the dust, barefoot, with licorice drops in their mouths, feeling as though they had run off with everything in that town that was worth having.
Marilynne Robinson
#67. There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them.
Marilynne Robinson
#68. Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.
Marilynne Robinson
#69. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar.
Marilynne Robinson
#71. I'm not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do.
Marilynne Robinson
#72. Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.
Marilynne Robinson
#73. 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
#74. All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible.
Marilynne Robinson
#75. I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me.
Marilynne Robinson
#76. That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something.
Marilynne Robinson
#77. I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.
Marilynne Robinson
#78. When I lecture, under almost all circumstances, I write a new lecture for the occasion. It helps me think. It helps me make demands of myself that I would not otherwise make.
Marilynne Robinson
#80. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't expect to find it, either.
Marilynne Robinson
#81. This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is ... So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.
Marilynne Robinson
#82. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?
Marilynne Robinson
#83. When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
Marilynne Robinson
#84. 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
#85. There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?
Marilynne Robinson
#86. You never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.
Marilynne Robinson
#87. In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate. When we accept dismissive judgements of our community we stop having generous hopes for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.
Marilynne Robinson
#88. 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
#89. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
Marilynne Robinson
#90. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
Marilynne Robinson
#91. I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.
Marilynne Robinson
#92. Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.
Marilynne Robinson
#93. It is true for everyone that the experience that society gives to us, or denies us, is profoundly formative.
Marilynne Robinson
#94. Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought.
Marilynne Robinson
#96. 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
#97. I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that.
Marilynne Robinson
#98. Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. Nothing could be more
Marilynne Robinson
#99. Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
Marilynne Robinson
#100. It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.
Marilynne Robinson
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