Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

— Marilynne Robinson

He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn't even know he wanted, and here it was.

— Marilynne Robinson

Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. Furthermore, she lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out.

— Marilynne Robinson

His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing.

— Marilynne Robinson

How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

— Marilynne Robinson

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

— Marilynne Robinson

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature.

— Marilynne Robinson

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned 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.

— Marilynne Robinson

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

— Marilynne Robinson

I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.

— Marilynne Robinson