Marilynne Robinson Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Marilynne Robinson
Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.

Marilynne Robinson
It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

Marilynne Robinson
It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness.

Marilynne Robinson
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact.

Marilynne Robinson
What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.

Marilynne Robinson
These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

Marilynne Robinson
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.

Marilynne Robinson
Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

Marilynne Robinson
Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.

Marilynne Robinson
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
To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

Marilynne Robinson
That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

Marilynne Robinson
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
I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

Marilynne Robinson
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

Marilynne Robinson
Rejoice with those who rejoice." I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.

Marilynne Robinson
For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings.

Marilynne Robinson
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
Not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.

Marilynne Robinson
The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.

Marilynne Robinson
She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord... I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.

Marilynne Robinson
Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.

Marilynne Robinson
I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge " because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.

Marilynne Robinson
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

Marilynne Robinson
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
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.

Marilynne Robinson
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

Marilynne Robinson
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
There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

Marilynne Robinson