Quote

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.

Marilynne Robinson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marilynne Robinson
Age: 80
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Really
Worst
Think
Gone
Thinking
Lasts
Like
Hope
World
Left
Makes
Nothing
Except
Thing
Fool

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

Image
I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
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.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
[John] Calvin treats experience as essentially visionary and revelatory from moment to moment, addressed to the individual perceiver, the individual soul. Where this is assumed preconceptions can only distract and obscure, though, of course, as human beings we can never wholly free ourselves of them.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
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.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
Grace has a grand laughter in it.
Marilynne Robinson
Image
It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
Marilynne Robinson