Marilynne Robinson famous quotes

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

#Love Is #What Matters #Grace

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

#Rain #Sunday #Garden

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

#Reality #Justice #Causes

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

#Mystery #Splendid

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

#Struggle #Thinking #Enough

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Wind #Shoes #Apples

There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every 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

#Dream #Memories #Home

The only obligation I recognize is to say what I believe to be true [ ] and to say it with kindness. I believe that is how a Christian conversation should proceed.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Christian #Kindness #Believe

If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Would Be #Old Testament #Summary

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

#Loneliness #Believe #Discovery

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.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Giving #Nonsense #Distraction

I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Facts #Done #Ease

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Inspiring #Reason #This Life

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

#Exercise #Fiction #May

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

#Fear #Prayer #Heart

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. ... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Order #Errors #Grace

I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Art #Utterance #Want

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

#Art #Believe #Genius

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Beautiful #Memories #Hate

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Ordinary #Ordinary Things #Numinous

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

#Mind #Want

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

#Mean #Judging

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Philosophy #Book #Eye

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

#Loneliness #Vision #Faces

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

#Mean #Home #Faithful

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

#Loyalty #Father #Son

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

#Heart #Nursing #People

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

#Giving #Interesting #Attention

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

#Prayer #Grateful #Dark

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

#Mother #Matter #Common

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

#Writing #Thinking #Profound

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

#Father #People #Enemy

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Lonely #Night #People

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

#Heart #Eye #Light

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

#Religious #Thinking #Imagination

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

#Found #Difficult #Rejoice

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

#Defense #Said #Posture

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

#Eye #Shining #World

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

#Virtue #Offense

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

#Giving #Justice #People

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

#Memories

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Loneliness #People #Guilt

You have to live with your mind your whole life.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Mind #Whole Life

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.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Levels #Worst #Advise

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

#Too Much #Littles #Imagine

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Dream #Fall #Eye

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

#Prayer #Writing #Praying

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

#Light #Turns #Constant

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

#Pain #Thinking #Humanity

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

#Eye #Men #Thinking

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

#Jesus #Afterlife #Soldier

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

#Life #Eye #Stones

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Song #Numbers #Sorrow

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

#Loss #Light #Joy

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

#Dark #Roots #May

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

#Mother #Time #Children

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.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Trying #Sifting #Wonderful

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

#Way #Life Is #Good Things

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

#Men #Understanding #World

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

#Love Is #Needs #Doe

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

#Taken #Facts #Arbitrary

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Mind #Purpose #Humans

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.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Christian #Believe #Needs

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Important #Letters #Ordinary Things

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

#People #Forgotten #Goodness

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

#Life #Missing #Quiet

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

#Book #Reading #Worry

Many times when I stop working on a problem consciously, my mind continues to work on it below the surface. Often solutions come on me quite by surprise. I've learned over time to allow that to happen, rather than to feel that I can simply solve the problem by continuous, grueling effort.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Effort #Mind #Surprise

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Strong #Growing Up #Thinking

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.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Mother #Expectations #Waiting

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

#Loneliness #Writing #Passion

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

#Artist #People #Culture

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

#People #Needs #Moments

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Character #Law #Needs

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

#Regret #People #Doubt

There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.
-- Marilynne Robinson

#Education #Tired #Science

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

#Family #Loyalty #Thinking

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

#Self #Generosity #Casting