Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I’d rather drop dead doing for myself than add a day to my life by acting helpless.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

211. “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

212. “Kindly intentioned, but not considerate.”

— Marilynne Robinson

213. “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

214. “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

215. “There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

225. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

238. “I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.”

— Marilynne Robinson

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

242. “And she was old, too. For a woman being old just means not being young, and all the youth had been worked out of her before it had really even set in.”

— Marilynne Robinson

243. “Vision sometimes comes in a memory.”

— Marilynne Robinson

244. “How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance.”

— Marilynne Robinson

245. “She pretended he knew some of her thoughts, only some of them, the ones she would like to show him.”

— Marilynne Robinson

246. “She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It certainly did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family.”

— Marilynne Robinson

247. “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

248. “You best keep to yourself, except you never can.”

— Marilynne Robinson

249. “I think it is notable in this connection that it is not Adam but the Lord who rebukes Cain.”

— Marilynne Robinson

250. “I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing.”

— Marilynne Robinson