Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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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. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

257. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

259. “Vision sometimes comes in a memory.”

— Marilynne Robinson

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

278. “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

279. “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

280. “I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether – if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

284. “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

285. “I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preoisterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.”

— Marilynne Robinson

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

293. “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

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.”

— Marilynne Robinson