Marilynne Robinson Quotes: 10

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

  Home

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

  Gilead

• 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?

  Gilead

• I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

  Gilead

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

  Gilead

• I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.

  Home

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

  Gilead

• You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

  Gilead

• It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

  Gilead

• We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself.