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

152. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

157. “History could make a stone weep.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

159. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

176. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don’t know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.”

— Marilynne Robinson

191. “This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

192. “She knew better than to waste that time. There isn’t always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you’re being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was little enough to carry, she could hardly bring herself to put him down.”

— Marilynne Robinson

193. “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

194. “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

195. “She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn’t any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same.”

— Marilynne Robinson

196. “I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.”

— Marilynne Robinson

197. “There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid.”

— Marilynne Robinson

198. “Let us say, as a thought experiment, that someone in a country equipped with doomsday weapons fears attack from another country and strikes preemptively. There would be thousands of years of cultural history and some few decades of personal history behind the decision. Madman though he might be, he would have brought the species to a culmination that humankind had been preparing for eons. To say that a spasm of activity in a region of his brain was crucial to the event would be utterly trivial.”

— Marilynne Robinson

199. “When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.”

— Marilynne Robinson

200. “You can say to yourself, I’m just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it. You don’t have to know why. Well, nothing could ever change if your body didn’t just keep you there not even knowing what it is you’re waiting for. Not even knowing that you’re waiting at all. Just there on the stoop in the moonlight, licking up tears.”

— Marilynne Robinson