Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

About Marilynne Robinson:

Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She has received several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 and the 2012 National Humanities Medal.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Marilynne Robinson

It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.

Marilynne Robinson

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 t...

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

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannon be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrow...

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

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

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

Marilynne Robinson

I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a...

Marilynne Robinson

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

Marilynne Robinson

I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I'm very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept m...

Marilynne Robinson

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 natu...

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

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

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

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

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

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.

Marilynne Robinson

Author Bio

  • NameMarilynne Robinson
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist and essayist
  • BornNovember 26, 1943
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksHousekeeping; Gilead; Home
  • AwardsHemingway Foundation/PEN Award; National Book Critics Circle Award; Pulitzer Prize For Fiction; National Humanities Medal