Marilynne Robinson Quotes

“I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.”

“In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”

“There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

“… not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.”

“… if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.”

“… there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.”

“… but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.”

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

“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.”

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

“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.”

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.”

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.”

“Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, "Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.”

“Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient”

“It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.”

“Grace has a grand laughter in it.”

“It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”

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

“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”

“I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”

“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.”

“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”

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

“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.”

“Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.”

“And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.”

“Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”

“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 of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

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

“You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.”

“I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.”

“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.”

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

“It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”

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

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting… By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”

“I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.


I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.”

“He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required”

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

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.”