Top 350 Marilynne Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?”

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.”

— Marilynne Robinson

308. “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

309. “There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe.”

— Marilynne Robinson

310. “After a while she said, “If you make a sound it’s just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it’s a word. It means something. It can’t not mean something.”

— Marilynne Robinson

311. “It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion in ways and degrees these arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim’s progress through earthly life seems to be eroding.”

— Marilynne Robinson

312. “What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend, and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by? And that was when the times were decent.”

— Marilynne Robinson

313. “It’s better to have nothing,′ the children were saying.”

— Marilynne Robinson

314. “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

315. “She was afraid to be angry and that made her angry.”

— Marilynne Robinson

316. “I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Scientific Socialists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis. Darwin influenced the nationalist writer Heinrich von Treitschke and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who influenced Hitler and also the milieu in which he flourished.”

— Marilynne Robinson

317. “We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.”

— Marilynne Robinson

318. “Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools’ errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

319. “It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike.”

— Marilynne Robinson

320. “I talked once with a cabdriver who had spent years in prison. He said he had no idea that the world was something he could be interested in. And then he read a book.”

— Marilynne Robinson

321. “In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?”

— Marilynne Robinson

322. “But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never knoew what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing.”

— Marilynne Robinson

323. “There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West.”

— Marilynne Robinson

324. “I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature.”

— Marilynne Robinson

325. “We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.”

— Marilynne Robinson

326. “Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of ‘the modern,’ that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

327. “Sylvie was pretty, but she was prettiest when something had just startled her into feeling that the world had to be dealt with in some way, and then she undertook the most ordinary things with an arch, tense, tentative good will that made them seem difficult and remarkable, and she was delighted by even partial successes.”

— Marilynne Robinson

328. “It is hardship that makes clear who the “fighters” are.”

— Marilynne Robinson

329. “We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth in all its variety because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe.”

— Marilynne Robinson

330. “So often I have known, right there in the pulpit, even as I read the words, how far they fell short of any hopes I had for them.”

— Marilynne Robinson

331. “She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.”

— Marilynne Robinson

332. “She closed one eye and looked at me and said, “I know there is a blessing in this somewhere.”

— Marilynne Robinson

333. “I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it.”

— Marilynne Robinson

334. “Then I realised that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them... And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time...”

— Marilynne Robinson

335. “So many of earth’s grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.”

— Marilynne Robinson

336. “It is clearly true that the reflex of disparagement is no more compatible with rigorous inquiry than the impulse to glorify.”

— Marilynne Robinson

337. “There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor.”

— Marilynne Robinson

338. “Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries.”

— Marilynne Robinson

339. “While the Citizen can entertain aspirations for the society as a whole and take pride in its achievements, the Taxpayer, as presently imagined, simply does not want to pay taxes. The societal consequences of this aversion – failing infrastructure, for example – are to be preferred to any inroad on his or her momentary fiefdom.”

— Marilynne Robinson

340. “He was waiting to see what she would make of him, as they say. And then he would be what she made of him.”

— Marilynne Robinson

341. “There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.”

— Marilynne Robinson

342. “Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.”

— Marilynne Robinson

343. “Those who can’t hope can still wish.”

— Marilynne Robinson

344. “I need not fear that the Lord would come to me with His sorrows.”

— Marilynne Robinson

345. “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. If there is no Lord, then things are just the way they look to us. Which is really much harder to accept. I mean, it doesn’t feel right. There has to be more to it all, I believe.”

— Marilynne Robinson

346. “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

— Marilynne Robinson

347. “I should leave, she told herself once or twice, to savor the thought of their surprise, their regret. What a childish idea. Then Jack would leave, no doubt, so that should would come back, as she would have to do, and her father would be plunged in sorrow of which she was directly the cause, and which would not end in this life.”

— Marilynne Robinson

348. “The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.”

— Marilynne Robinson

349. “I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.”

— Marilynne Robinson

350. “She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.”

— Marilynne Robinson