Marilynne Robinson Quotes & Sayings

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery. — Marilynne Robinson

My Calvinism persuades me that we are open to God, in the sense that we are not delimited, not organisms with fixed attributes in the manner of the other creatures, but are instead participants in a reality that utterly exceeds our powers of description. — Marilynne Robinson

There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe. — Marilynne Robinson

I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me. — Marilynne Robinson

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all. — Marilynne Robinson

Fearfulness obscures the distinction between real threat on one hand and on the other the terrors that beset those who see threat everywhere ... Granting the perils of the world, it is potentially a very costly indulgence to fear indiscriminately, and to try to stimulate fear in others, just for the excitement of it, or because to do so channels anxiety or loneliness or prejudice or resentment into an emotion that can seem to those who indulge it like shrewdness or courage or patriotism. — Marilynne Robinson

In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned. — Marilynne Robinson

Light is constant, we just turn over in it. — Marilynne Robinson

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

The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating. — Marilynne Robinson

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. — Marilynne Robinson

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. — Marilynne Robinson

We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish. — Marilynne Robinson

If heaven was to be this world purged of disaster and nuisance, if immortality was to be this life held in poise and arrest, and if this world purged and this life unconsuming could be thought of as world and life restored to their proper natures, it is no wonder that five serene, eventless years lulled my grandmother into forgetting what she should never have forgotten. — Marilynne Robinson

Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally? — Marilynne Robinson

I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come. — Marilynne Robinson

If we focused on using the opportunities we have, which are very great by any standard - health, longevity, comfort and privacy, endless resources of culture and information - we would not just navigate this world, we would leave a good inheritance to succeeding generations. — Marilynne Robinson

The physical body can crave sleep with an animal greed, as everybody knows. Then it is snappish when it is disturbed, as I would have been if I hadn't had the memory, at least, of praying for tranquillity. — Marilynne Robinson

I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. — Marilynne Robinson

When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, "I was hungry, and ye fed me not" (Matthew 25:42). — Marilynne Robinson

I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that's not how I understand morality. I much prefer the "everyone is sacred, and everybody errs" model of reality. — Marilynne Robinson

Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being - for those who create and master them, at least. Now — 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

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

My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine. — Marilynne Robinson

She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting. — Marilynne Robinson

We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal. So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn't really an answer to my question. We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning though, and I did no more baptizing until I was ordained ... — Marilynne Robinson

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this. — 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. (p. 146) — Marilynne Robinson

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he'd spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

When you encounter another person ... 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? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it ... I am reminded of this precious instruction by my own great failure to live up to it recently ... — Marilynne Robinson

I'd rather drop dead doing for myself than add a day to my life by acting helpless. — Marilynne Robinson

The furtive closing of a door is a sound the wind can make a dozen times in an hour. A flow of damp air from the lake can make any house feel empty. Such currents pull one's dreams after them, and one's own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things. — 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

I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people's experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it's a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don't think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in. — Marilynne Robinson

I always tell my students that you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you're doing, you're not doing it well enough. — Marilynne Robinson

We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable. — Marilynne Robinson

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing. — Marilynne Robinson

The Lord gave you a mind so that you can make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment. — Marilynne Robinson

So I decided a little waltzing would be very good, and it was. I plan to do all my waltzing here in the study. I have thought I might have a book ready at hand to clutch if I began to experience unusual pain, so that would have been a special recommendation from being found in my hands. That seems theatrical, on consideration, and it might have the perverse effective of burdening the book with unpleasant associations. The ones I considered, by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth's Epistle to the Romans and Volume II of Calvin's institutes. Which is by no means to slight volume I. — Marilynne Robinson

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

If we do not know the character of being itself - I have never seen anyone suggest that we do know it - then there is an inevitable superficiality in any claim to an exhaustive description of anything that participates in being. And the assertion of the existence, or the nonexistence, of God is the ultimate exhaustive description. — Marilynne Robinson

The young might have been restless around any primal fire where an elder was saying, Know this. Certainly they would have been restless. Their bodies were consumed with the business of lengthening limbs, sprouting hair, fitting themselves for procreation. — Marilynne Robinson

Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view. — Marilynne Robinson

And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. — Marilynne Robinson

Children seem to think that every pleasant thing has to be a surprise. — Marilynne Robinson

The world don't want you as long as there is any life in you at all. — Marilynne Robinson

That stab in the heart she felt when she woke, and the panicky doubt that her life was in her grasp, not fraud or failure, not entirely - that was a brief misery and one she could set aside by putting the light on and reading for a while. 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

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time. — Marilynne Robinson

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'I' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'I' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. — Marilynne Robinson

Lila would never tell anyone about that time. She knew it would sound very sad, and it wasn't, really. — Marilynne Robinson

All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible. — Marilynne Robinson

You must forgive in order to understand. — Marilynne Robinson

It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it ... so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. — Marilynne Robinson

Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightening, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends. All of them could sit on their heels into their old age, and they'd do it by preference, as if they had a grudge against furniture. They had no flesh on them at all. They were like the Hebrew prophets in some unwilling retirement, or like the primitive church still waiting to judge the angels ... It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire. — Marilynne Robinson

Walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world - what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us. — Marilynne Robinson

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books. — Marilynne Robinson

We would have visions in those days,a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams — Marilynne Robinson

As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house
even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that's all right. 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 a 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 and consequence? — Marilynne Robinson

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. — Marilynne Robinson

I really should not be so willing to interpret my own books as I seem to be this evening. But the blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too. He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do it, that Jack accepted it, wanted it. I really do believe that all blessing is mutual, and that the moment of blessing is when people rise to the very beautiful seriousness of what they are. I feel that we ought to value ourselves and one another far more than we do, and I'm speaking theologically here, but also with an awareness that always haunts me, that we are the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant - and perverse, of course. Our own overwhelming problem. But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter. If we came anywhere near respecting the richness of this improbable life - hopes would flourish and blossom as they have never done before. — Marilynne Robinson

You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea ... You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. — Marilynne Robinson

The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that's just how things are. — Marilynne Robinson

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. — Marilynne Robinson

And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. — Marilynne Robinson

Now, that is probably my least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world. I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one's understanding ever advanced one iota. I've seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he would bring up predestination! — Marilynne Robinson

It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. — Marilynne Robinson

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

The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? — Marilynne Robinson

Sometimes I'm just up the whole night wishing I weren't. (I do recommend prayer at such times, because often they mean something is in need of resolving. — Marilynne Robinson

So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention. — Marilynne Robinson

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention. — Marilynne Robinson

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

The second you walk off down that road I'll start telling myself you're gone for good, and why wouldn't you be, and I'll start trying to hate you for it. I will hate you for it. I might even leave here entirely. — Marilynne Robinson

I am in a state of categorical unbelief. I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean. (Jack Boughton) — Marilynne Robinson

We [Americans] inherited British law, which is like the new "reforms" that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history - the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here. — Marilynne Robinson

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness. — Marilynne Robinson

Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery. — Marilynne Robinson

This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven - one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. — Marilynne Robinson

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. — Marilynne Robinson

I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. — Marilynne Robinson

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

I read things like theology, and I read about science, 'Scientific American' and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. — Marilynne Robinson

There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things. — 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

This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. — Marilynne Robinson

There is no justice in love ... it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality ... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal. — Marilynne Robinson

When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil. — Marilynne Robinson

There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid — Marilynne Robinson

So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensational. — Marilynne Robinson

I have spent years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of . . . people who do not exist. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature. — Marilynne Robinson

it's hard to find time to think about Kansas. — Marilynne Robinson

A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe. — Marilynne Robinson