Marilynne Robinson Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.

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

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

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.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

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

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

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

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

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

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

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

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.

We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.

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

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

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

--"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.

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

... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

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.

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

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.

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

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

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.

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.

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.

Grace has a grand laughter in it.