Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “So she prayed, Lord, give me patience. She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it... it cost her tears to think that her situation might actually be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding – for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her to preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven’s sake.”

— Marilynne Robinson

102. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

104. “The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other. Ames.”

— Marilynne Robinson

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

110. “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

111. “In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

113. “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

114. “My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same.”

— Marilynne Robinson

115. “My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

116. “Now, that is probably my least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world. I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one’s understanding ever advanced one iota. I’ve seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he would bring up predestination!”

— Marilynne Robinson

117. “Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.”

— Marilynne Robinson

118. “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

119. “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

120. “There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

121. “So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.”

— Marilynne Robinson

122. “There is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the innocence of children.”

— Marilynne Robinson

123. “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

124. “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

125. “There were, in fact, several churches whose visions of sin and salvation were so ecstatic, and so nearly identical, that the superiority of one church over another could be argued only in terms of good works. And the obligation to perform these works rested squarely with the women, since salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.”

— Marilynne Robinson

126. “I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.”

— Marilynne Robinson

127. “I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.”

— Marilynne Robinson

128. “It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m 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

129. “And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.”

— Marilynne Robinson

130. “I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with.”

— Marilynne Robinson

131. “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

132. “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

133. “Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.”

— Marilynne Robinson

134. “Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

135. “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

136. “The twinkling of an eye... that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. ‘The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.’ That’s a fact.”

— Marilynne Robinson

137. “I know more than I know and must learn it from myself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

138. “When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant. Now.”

— Marilynne Robinson

139. “And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.”

— Marilynne Robinson

140. “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

141. “I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God’s good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.”

— Marilynne Robinson

142. “Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me.”

— Marilynne Robinson

143. “There are many ways to live a good life.”

— Marilynne Robinson

144. “I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.”

— Marilynne Robinson

145. “Meaningless would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn’t be meaningless. That’s where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can’t get away from it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

146. “You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. ‘The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.’ There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

147. “When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.”

— Marilynne Robinson

148. “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

149. “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

150. “I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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