Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

54. “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

55. “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.”

— Marilynne Robinson

56. “I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

57. “There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.”

— Marilynne Robinson

58. “A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.”

— Marilynne Robinson

59. “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

60. “Light is constant, we just turn over in it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

61. “Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought, and wild, more life in us than we can bear, the fire infolding itself in us. That peace could only be amazement, too.”

— Marilynne Robinson

62. “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.”

— Marilynne Robinson

63. “We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.”

— Marilynne Robinson

64. “Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”

— Marilynne Robinson

65. “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

66. “When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the ‘I’ whose predicate can be ‘love’ or ‘fear’ or ‘want,’ and whose object can be ‘someone’ or ‘nothing’ and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around ‘I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.”

— Marilynne Robinson

67. “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

68. “If heaven was to be this world purged of disaster and nuisance, if immortality was to be this life held in poise and arrest, and if this world purged and this life unconsuming could be thought of as world and life restored to their proper natures, it is no wonder that five serene, eventless years lulled my grandmother into forgetting what she should never have forgotten.”

— Marilynne Robinson

69. “Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.”

— Marilynne Robinson

70. “When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.”

— Marilynne Robinson

71. “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

72. “So my advice is this – don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

73. “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, according to the epistle of James. But we have lived for years with the raucous influence of self-declared Christians who are clearly convinced that their wrath and God’s righteousness are one and the same.”

— Marilynne Robinson

74. “The immense water thunked and thudded beneath my head, and I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.”

— Marilynne Robinson

75. “The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous – dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.”

— Marilynne Robinson

76. “Time that had not come yet – an anomaly in itself – had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.”

— Marilynne Robinson

77. “You have to live with your mind your whole life.”

— Marilynne Robinson

78. “Grace has a grand laughter in it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

79. “In St. Louis one of the girls had said to her, Just pretend you’re pretty so they can pretend you’re pretty.”

— Marilynne Robinson

80. “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

81. “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

82. “He will wipe the tears from all faces.′ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.”

— Marilynne Robinson

83. “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

84. “I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I’ll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.”

— Marilynne Robinson

85. “Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.”

— Marilynne Robinson

86. “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 really expect to find it, either.”

— Marilynne Robinson

87. “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

88. “Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.”

— Marilynne Robinson

89. “She thought, if we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table and me, I don’t know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we’re here he’ll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones.”

— Marilynne Robinson

90. “A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. “Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire” – that’s the truth.”

— Marilynne Robinson

91. “While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine – not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world...”

— 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. “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

94. “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

95. “I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.”

— Marilynne Robinson

96. “And as we glided across the ice toward Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer.”

— Marilynne Robinson

97. “Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.”

— Marilynne Robinson

98. “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

99. “I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again – if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.”

— Marilynne Robinson

100. “If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go.”

— Marilynne Robinson