Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

108. “The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that’s just how things are.”

— Marilynne Robinson

109. “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

110. “She kept saying, “My husband will be back soon. He went for help. He’ll be back.” But that’s the kind of lie people tell sometimes when they got only strangers to rely on. There’s shame in that, so people lie.”

— Marilynne Robinson

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

119. “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

120. “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

121. “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.”

— Marilynne Robinson

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

128. “I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”

— Marilynne Robinson

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.”

— Marilynne Robinson

134. “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”

— Marilynne Robinson

135. “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. That’s a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it’s also the Lord’s truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience.”

— Marilynne Robinson

136. “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

137. “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

138. “It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.”

— Marilynne Robinson

139. “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

140. “The furtive closing of a door is a sound the wind can make a dozen times in an hour. A flow of damp air from the lake can make any house feel empty. Such currents pull one’s dreams after them, and one’s own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things.”

— Marilynne Robinson

141. “I’m amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don’t know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.”

— Marilynne Robinson

142. “I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

144. “It was the seahorses themselves that she wanted to see as soon as she took her eyes away, and that she wanted to see even when she was looking at them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

145. “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

146. “Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.”

— Marilynne Robinson

147. “I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.”

— Marilynne Robinson

148. “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

149. “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

150. “In eternity people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either.”

— Marilynne Robinson