Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.”

— Marilynne Robinson

2. “You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with.”

— Marilynne Robinson

3. “People don’t acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don’t appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

4. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient.”

— Marilynne Robinson

5. “Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”

— Marilynne Robinson

6. “Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes.”

— Marilynne Robinson

7. “Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.”

— Marilynne Robinson

8. “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

9. “There’s so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.”

— Marilynne Robinson

10. “I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.”

— Marilynne Robinson

11. “It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

12. “Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.”

— Marilynne Robinson

13. “When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.”

— Marilynne Robinson

14. “Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

— Marilynne Robinson

16. “Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.”

— Marilynne Robinson

17. “Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”

— Marilynne Robinson

18. “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.”

— Marilynne Robinson

19. “We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.”

— Marilynne Robinson

20. “And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.”

— Marilynne Robinson

21. “I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.”

— Marilynne Robinson

22. “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

23. “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

24. “There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.”

— Marilynne Robinson

25. “A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

— Marilynne Robinson

26. “A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?”

— Marilynne Robinson

27. “The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.”

— Marilynne Robinson

28. “For me, writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.”

— Marilynne Robinson

29. “People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you’re just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.”

— Marilynne Robinson

30. “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

31. “Musing thus, she set out upon on her widowhood, and became altogether as good a widow as she had been a wife.”

— Marilynne Robinson

32. “Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.”

— Marilynne Robinson

33. “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

34. “Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak.”

— Marilynne Robinson

35. “If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.”

— Marilynne Robinson

36. “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

37. “It’s not a man’s working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.”

— Marilynne Robinson

38. “A letter makes ordinary things seem important.”

— Marilynne Robinson

39. “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

40. “That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.”

— Marilynne Robinson

41. “They’re married people.” 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

42. “Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.”

— Marilynne Robinson

43. “There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

— Marilynne Robinson

44. “It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you’d never stop missing it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

45. “It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.”

— Marilynne Robinson

46. “When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.”

— Marilynne Robinson

47. “Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.”

— Marilynne Robinson

48. “Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”

— Marilynne Robinson

49. “I do believe that we stand at a threshold, as Bonhoeffer did, and that the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as I see it, in the knowledge that no society is at any time immune to moral catastrophe.”

— Marilynne Robinson

50. “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