Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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.”

— Marilynne Robinson

252. “Thinking that we know more than we do, therefore rejecting what we are given as experience, blinds us to our ignorance, which is the deep darkness where truth abides. And our wealth of ignorance grows and multiplies. Much.”

— Marilynne Robinson

253. “If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I’m sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy. And probably a little bit surprised.”

— Marilynne Robinson

254. “It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar.”

— Marilynne Robinson

255. “It is the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.”

— Marilynne Robinson

256. “When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?”

— Marilynne Robinson

257. “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

258. “Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthiritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.”

— Marilynne Robinson

259. “There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?”

— Marilynne Robinson

260. “Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.”

— Marilynne Robinson

261. “We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.”

— Marilynne Robinson

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup.”

— Marilynne Robinson

268. “Cleverness has a special piquancy when it blooms out of the fraying sleeve of failure.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

270. “I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.”

— Marilynne Robinson

271. “She could see it surprised him, too, sometimes. He told her once when there was a storm a bird had flown into the house. He’d never seen one like it. The wind must have carried it in from some far-off place. He opened all the doors and windows, but it was so desperate to escape that for a while it couldn’t find a way out. “It left a blessing in the house,” he said. “The wildness of it. Bringing the wind inside.”

— Marilynne Robinson

272. “If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.”

— Marilynne Robinson

273. “I am glad I didn’t understand, because I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need. Who would have thought that the moon could dazzle and flame like that?”

— Marilynne Robinson

274. “These little towns were once the bold ramparts meant to shelter just such peace.”

— Marilynne Robinson

275. “I thought I had learned not to set my heart on anything.”

— Marilynne Robinson

276. “It was that feeling that she had had walking along beside him that put the notion in her mind. It comes from being alone too much. Things matter that wouldn’t if you had a regular life.”

— Marilynne Robinson

277. “The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking – that is, in thinking that by definition is not one’s own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted – is a capitulation no one should ever make.”

— Marilynne Robinson

278. “Your mother asked him if he would like to say grace, and he did, with an elegant simplicity that seemed almost wasted on macaroni and cheese.”

— Marilynne Robinson

279. “She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all.”

— Marilynne Robinson

280. “I’m a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.”

— Marilynne Robinson

281. “Everywhere the crisis of the private financial system has been transformed into a tale of slovenly and overweening government that perpetuates and is perpetuated by a dependent and demanding population... For about ten days the crisis was interpreted as a consequence of the ineptitude of the highly paid, and then it transmogrified into a grudge against the populace at large.”

— Marilynne Robinson

282. “For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn’t writing prayers.”

— Marilynne Robinson

283. “I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it’s because they don’t read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.”

— Marilynne Robinson

284. “He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn’t even know he wanted, and here it was.”

— Marilynne Robinson

285. “She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.”

— Marilynne Robinson

286. “When the lord says you must ‘become as one of these little ones,’ I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretence and triviality.”

— Marilynne Robinson

287. “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.”

— Marilynne Robinson

288. “I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.”

— Marilynne Robinson

289. “She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.”

— Marilynne Robinson

290. “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

— Marilynne Robinson

291. “It was a shock to her, a need she only discovered when it was satisfied, for those few minutes. In those days she had all the needs she could stand already, and here was another one. So she said something mean to him. That’s how she was used to be and how she might be again someday, if she was ever just barely getting by and somebody seemed to be about to make it harder just by making it different.”

— Marilynne Robinson

292. “My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places.”

— Marilynne Robinson

293. “I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.“... “Were you as sad as you were sad? As lonely as you were lonely? I wasn’t.” “Me neither. I would have died of it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

294. “I believe the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don’t have.”

— Marilynne Robinson

295. “The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn’t one of them. Well, this world isn’t one either.”

— Marilynne Robinson

296. “Thinking about hell doesn’t help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. So I don’t want to encourage anyone else to think that way either.”

— Marilynne Robinson

297. “But watching Sylvie seemed very much like dreaming, because the motion was always the same, and was necessary, and arduous, and without issue, and repeated, not as one motion in a series, but as the same motion repeated because here was the mystery, if one could find it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

298. “Perhaps the worst thing about ideological thinking is that it implies a structure in and behind events, a history that is reiterative, with variations that cannot ultimately change the course of things and are therefore always trivial, no matter how much thought and labor goes into the making of them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

299. “Most institutions of higher learning in the West were founded by and for religious denominations. The supposed alienation of education and faith is a recent phenomenon. At the same time, neither education nor the lack of it predisposes one to faith.”

— Marilynne Robinson

300. “My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance.”

— Marilynne Robinson