Marilynne Robinson Quotes

Those things which I am saying now may be obscure, yet they will be made clearer in their proper place.

I'm here to make sense.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Lady Gaga said to me, 'You showed me how it's done.' I have no idea what she meant by 'it.'

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

I want people to make sense of what I'm talking about.

when driven to the necessity of explaining, I found that I did not myself understand what I meant.

I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

For me context is the key - from that comes the understanding of everything.

There is a profound difference between information and meaning.

People need meanings to everything. People want you to intellectualize every choice you make.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

I can explain this to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you.

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

Understanding sometimes is not enough to explain something.

I'm not going to parse the statement. You've got the statement I made earlier and the statement speaks for itself.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.

If you would judge, understand.

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'