Marilynne Robinson Quotes - Page 6

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• I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Sides, Four, Letters

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Doe, Fiction, Acknowledge

  Marilynne Robinson (2012). “When I Was A Child I Read Books”, p.11, Hachette UK

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• Light is constant, we just turn over in it.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Light, Constant, Turns

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.210, Macmillan

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• The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example - a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Children, Real, Ambition

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Many times when I stop working on a problem consciously, my mind continues to work on it below the surface. Often solutions come on me quite by surprise. I've learned over time to allow that to happen, rather than to feel that I can simply solve the problem by continuous, grueling effort.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Effort, Mind, Problem

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• When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Children, Believe, Mean

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.102, Macmillan

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• There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?

  Marilynne Robinson

  Book, Reading, Worry

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• If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Dream, Thinking, Reality

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Regret, People, Doubt

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• Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  "Marilynne Robinson: A Good Inheritance". Interview with Michele Filgate, www.barnesandnoble.com. October 21, 2014.

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• A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith.

  Marilynne Robinson

  People, Listening, Assuming

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it . . . so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Laughter, Struggle, People

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.5, Macmillan

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• I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Character, Attention, Rewards

  "One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality". Interview with Gregory Barber, www.motherjones.com. October 25, 2015.

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• That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Children, Spring, Angel

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.119, Macmillan

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• I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition - there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry - both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Religious, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Art, Real, Nice

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Loneliness, People, Guilt

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.6, Macmillan

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• If we focused on using the opportunities we have, which are very great by any standard - health, longevity, comfort and privacy, endless resources of culture and information - we would not just navigate this world, we would leave a good inheritance to succeeding generations.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Opportunity, Inheritance, World

  "Marilynne Robinson: A Good Inheritance". Interview with Michele Filgate, www.barnesandnoble.com. October 21, 2014.

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• . . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Father, Absolutes, Our Father

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.73, Macmillan

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• I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that's not how I understand morality. I much prefer the "everyone is sacred, and everybody errs" model of reality.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Thinking, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Somebody who had read Lila asked me, ‘Why do you write about the problem of loneliness?’ I said: ‘It’s not a problem. It’s a condition. It’s a passion of a kind. It’s not a problem. I think that people make it a problem by interpreting it that way.’ 

  Marilynne Robinson

  Loneliness, Passion, Writing

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• A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Eye, Clouds, Air

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.5, Macmillan

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• I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Book, Reading, Gentleman

  FaceBook post by Marilynne Robinson from Feb 15, 2012

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• I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Taken, Arbitrary, Facts

  "Marilynne Robinson Extended Interview". Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. September 18, 2009.

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• Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Nature, Two, People

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.63, Macmillan

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