You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn’t even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

— Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson Quotes

There are many ways to live a good life.

— Marilynne Robinson

Meaningless would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn’t be meaningless. That’s where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can’t get away from it.

— Marilynne Robinson

After a while she said, “If you make a sound it’s just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it’s a word. It means something. It can’t not mean something.

— Marilynne Robinson

So many of earth’s grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.

— Marilynne Robinson

Forever after, the thought of her would be painful, because it had been pleasant. Strange how that is.

— Marilynne Robinson

I’m a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.

— Marilynne Robinson

Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries.

— Marilynne Robinson

An intensely lonely man for whom life had not gone well – I believe this was your language.

— Marilynne Robinson

Sometimes I feel like we’ve just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That’s how it would seem to us when we looked back.

— Marilynne Robinson

That’s how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed.

— Marilynne Robinson

The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.

— Marilynne Robinson

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.

— Marilynne Robinson

Embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness.

— Marilynne Robinson

And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another. Everybody is vulnerable. It’s kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility.

— Marilynne Robinson

You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn’t even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

— Marilynne Robinson

Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one’s neighbors.

— Marilynne Robinson

I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.

— Marilynne Robinson

She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.

— Marilynne Robinson

He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.

— Marilynne Robinson

I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life.

— Marilynne Robinson
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