Marilynne Robinson Quotes

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.

I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.

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

I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.

I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.

When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.

It is hardship that makes clear who the "fighters" are.

...not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.

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

You have to live with your mind your whole life.

When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.

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.

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.

It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do.

I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.

Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.

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

People don't acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don't appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.

I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.

Light is constant, we just turn over in it.

Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.

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

When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.

I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.

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

I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with.

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.

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.

...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.

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

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.

It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.

Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all.

More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.

I felt, as I have often felt, that my failing the truth could have no bearing at all on the Truth itself, which could never conceivably be in any sense dependent on me or on anyone.

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.

i know more than i know and must learn it from myself