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

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

Marilynne Robinson

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 cr...

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 p...

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

I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.

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

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, jus...

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

Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our sens...

Marilynne Robinson

For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many...

Marilynne Robinson

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 tha...

Marilynne Robinson

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

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 t...

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 ...

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?

Marilynne Robinson

If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn't have to worry about any of this.

Marilynne Robinson

She knew there were words so terrible you heard them with your whole body. Guilty. And there were voices to say them. She knew there were people you might almost trust who would hear them, too, and be amazed, and still not really hear them because th...

Marilynne Robinson

There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them.

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