620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I’ve read.

Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak.

I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether – if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.

Fear and comfort could be the same thing. It was strange, when she thought of it. The wind always somewhere, trifling with the leaves, troubling the firelight. And that smell of damp earth and bruised grass, a lonely, yearning sort of smell that meant, Why don’t you come back, you will come back, you know you will.

There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being.

That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup.

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learnt to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.