Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “I think that in our earlier history – the Gettysburg Address or something – there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

157. “This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean.”

— Marilynne Robinson

158. “When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone.”

— Marilynne Robinson

159. “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

160. “Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”

— Marilynne Robinson

161. “History could make a stone weep.”

— Marilynne Robinson

162. “So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.”

— Marilynne Robinson

163. “It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

164. “I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.”

— Marilynne Robinson

165. “Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.”

— Marilynne Robinson

166. “Fear and comfort could be the same thing. It was strange, when she thought of it. The wind always somewhere, trifling with the leaves, troubling the firelight. And that smell of damp earth and bruised grass, a lonely, yearning sort of smell that meant, Why don’t you come back, you will come back, you know you will.”

— Marilynne Robinson

167. “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

168. “You’re my wife,” he said. “I want to take care of you, even if that means someday seeing you to the train.”

— Marilynne Robinson

169. “You would never have imagined that almost empty sanctuary, just a few women there with heavy veils on to try to hide the masks they were wearing, and two or three men. I preached with a scarf around my mouth for more than a year. Everyone smelled like onions, because word went around that flu germs were killed by onions. People rubbed themselves down with tobacco leaves.”

— Marilynne Robinson

170. “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

171. “I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.”

— Marilynne Robinson

172. “It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.”

— Marilynne Robinson

173. “She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.”

— Marilynne Robinson

174. “I am 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

175. “And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair.”

— Marilynne Robinson

176. “What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.”

— Marilynne Robinson

177. “Well, he says, basically, that people have to suffer to really recognize grace when it comes. I.”

— Marilynne Robinson

178. “I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected – an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.”

— Marilynne Robinson

179. “Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet.”

— Marilynne Robinson

180. “It was as if the light had coaxed a flowering from the frost, which before seemed barren and parched as salt. The grass shone with petal colors, and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerably as petals.”

— Marilynne Robinson

181. “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?”

— Marilynne Robinson

182. “Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for us as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.”

— Marilynne Robinson

183. “I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learnt to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.”

— Marilynne Robinson

184. “That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. 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

185. “Doll always said, Just be quiet. Whatever it is, just wait for it to be over. Everything ends sometime.”

— Marilynne Robinson

186. “Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.”

— Marilynne Robinson

187. “I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say, “I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

188. “Forever after, the thought of her would be painful, because it had been pleasant. Strange how that is.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

190. “To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.”

— Marilynne Robinson

191. “I’d rather drop dead doing for myself than add a day to my life by acting helpless.”

— Marilynne Robinson

192. “She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.”

— Marilynne Robinson

193. “It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

195. “Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of a thought.”

— Marilynne Robinson

196. “Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. 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.”

— Marilynne Robinson

197. “To condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.”

— Marilynne Robinson

198. “It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do.”

— Marilynne Robinson

199. “The world don’t want you as long as there is any life in you at all.”

— Marilynne Robinson

200. “It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution.”

— Marilynne Robinson