Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

111. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

117. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

120. “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

121. “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

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. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensationalism.”

— Marilynne Robinson

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

145. “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

146. “The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.”

— Marilynne Robinson

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson