Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

208. “Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out.”

— Marilynne Robinson

209. “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

210. “Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery.”

— Marilynne Robinson

211. “I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time.”

— Marilynne Robinson

212. “There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don’t remember how I passed.”

— Marilynne Robinson

213. “I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

215. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

217. “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

218. “The best things that happen I’d never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.”

— Marilynne Robinson

219. “The fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done.”

— Marilynne Robinson

220. “I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don’t do that. In your own way, you’re kind of – pure.”

— Marilynne Robinson

221. “Kindly intentioned, but not considerate.”

— Marilynne Robinson

222. “I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I’ve read.”

— Marilynne Robinson

223. “Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.”

— Marilynne Robinson

224. “More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.”

— Marilynne Robinson

225. “She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones.”

— Marilynne Robinson

226. “In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt this instruction was inappropriate. When we accept dismissive judgements of our community we stop having generous hopes for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.”

— Marilynne Robinson

227. “In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you’re pretty.”

— Marilynne Robinson

228. “That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.”

— Marilynne Robinson

229. “I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.”

— Marilynne Robinson

230. “For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.”

— Marilynne Robinson

231. “The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.”

— Marilynne Robinson

232. “The night was windy, full of tree sounds. The moon was gone and there was rain, so fine that it was only a tingle on the skin.”

— Marilynne Robinson

233. “At the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.”

— Marilynne Robinson

234. “Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

235. “It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity.”

— Marilynne Robinson

236. “People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.”

— Marilynne Robinson

237. “She said, “I don’t know why I come here. That’s a fact.” He shrugged. “Since you are here, maybe you could tell me a little about yourself?” She shook her head. “I don’t talk about that. I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.” “Oh!” he said. “Then I’m glad you have some time to spare. I’ve been wondering about that more or less my whole life.”

— Marilynne Robinson

238. “There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being.”

— Marilynne Robinson

239. “Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannon be true. 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

240. “Any good thing is less good the more any human being lays claim to it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

241. “That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he’d spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

242. “The second you walk off down that road I’ll start telling myself you’re gone for good, and why wouldn’t you be, and I’ll start trying to hate you for it. I will hate you for it. I might even leave here entirely.”

— Marilynne Robinson

243. “That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

244. “Clean and acceptable. It would be something to know what that felt like, even for an hour or two.”

— Marilynne Robinson

245. “I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.”

— Marilynne Robinson

246. “You’re right not to talk. It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.”

— Marilynne Robinson

247. “Cranky old Leviticus gave us – gave Christ – not only “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” but also the rather forgotten “Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself,” two verses that appear to be merged in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.”

— Marilynne Robinson

248. “So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape.”

— Marilynne Robinson

249. “But when folks are down to the one thing that keeps them alive, that one thing can be meanness. It makes you feel like you’re there, you’re doing something.”

— Marilynne Robinson

250. “God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.”

— Marilynne Robinson