620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.

She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.

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

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

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

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