110+ Marilynne Robinson Quotes On Education, Religion And Creativity

Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She is best known for her novels Housekeeping and Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. Her other works include Home, Lila, and the essay collection The Givenness of Things. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marilynne Robinson on life, education, love.

Top 10 Marilynne Robinson Quotes

1. Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
2. 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.
3. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.
4. 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.
5. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me
6. There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient
7. 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.
8. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
9. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.
10. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.

Marilynne Robinson Short Quotes

• I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.
• It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
• I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
• That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.
• When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.
• 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.
• Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
• For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.

Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Life

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

And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. — 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

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. — Marilynne Robinson

You have to live with your mind your whole life. — 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

...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

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

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. — Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Love

... 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

--"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

I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine. — Marilynne Robinson

You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years. — 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

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. — Marilynne Robinson

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

There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes? — Marilynne Robinson

God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence. — Marilynne Robinson

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification. — Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Writing

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires. — Marilynne Robinson

Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché. — 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

Somebody who had read Lila asked me, ‘Why do you write about the problem of loneliness?’ I said: ‘It’s not a problem. It’s a condition. It’s a passion of a kind. It’s not a problem. I think that people make it a problem by interpreting it that way.’  — Marilynne Robinson

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers. — Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Beauty

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

It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. — 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

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. — 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

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

Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Children

I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine. — 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

It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying. — 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

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

Marilynne Robinson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege. — Marilynne Robinson

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. — Marilynne Robinson

To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise. — 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

My politics, and my religion as well, are based entirely on the loveliness and value of ordinary human lives. The creaky apparatus called politics shelters or oppresses or threatens these lives, and is therefore of interest. — 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

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

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

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest. — 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

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

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

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. — 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

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'm amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don't know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did. — Marilynne Robinson

The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one. — Marilynne Robinson

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 — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. [E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

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

Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it's hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness. — 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

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

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

I really can't claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I'm always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I'm very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don't have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak. — Marilynne Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with. — 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

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

A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. — Marilynne Robinson

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

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

This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is ... So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other. — 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

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

I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels. — Marilynne Robinson

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

Grace has a grand laughter in it. — 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

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

I really don't know why people have so much trouble now writing about religious faith. It is true that clichés can override more interesting impulses. But the desire to find meaning, to be generous, to live well in an ethical and spiritual sense, is so widespread that it should not seem alien to people when it is expressed in the terms of traditional religion. — Marilynne Robinson

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

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory - there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

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. — Marilynne Robinson

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

Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me. — Marilynne Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Marilynne Robinson

1. Marilynne Robinson's work emphasizes the importance of empathy and understanding in relationships, emphasizing the power of love and forgiveness.
2. Her writing also emphasizes the need for personal exploration and growth, and the importance of maintaining one's individual identity.
3. Robinson's work also highlights the importance of appreciating the beauty of the natural world, and the need to protect it from destruction.