Marilynne Robinson Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

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
A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.

Marilynne Robinson
But it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

Marilynne Robinson
People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.

Marilynne Robinson
Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

Marilynne Robinson
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.

Marilynne Robinson
I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.

Marilynne Robinson
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
That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's.

Marilynne Robinson
Christianity is a life, not a doctrine... I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own.

Marilynne Robinson
He [Christ] even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him — a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.

Marilynne Robinson
The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.

Marilynne Robinson
Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

Marilynne Robinson
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?

Marilynne Robinson
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

Marilynne Robinson
Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.

Marilynne Robinson
A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Marilynne Robinson
We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.

Marilynne Robinson
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

Marilynne Robinson
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

Marilynne Robinson
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Marilynne Robinson
There is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.

Marilynne Robinson
Pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.

Marilynne Robinson
I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God's grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

Marilynne Robinson
That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

Marilynne Robinson
It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

Marilynne Robinson