Marilynne Robinson Quotes - Page 8

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• In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Believe, Epic, World

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.57, Macmillan

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• Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally?

  Marilynne Robinson

  Fall, Aunt, Law

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.92, Macmillan

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• We have opted for petty determinisms - childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc. - that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses - which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Childhood, Comfort, Excuse

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I really can't claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I'm always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I'm very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don't have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Quality, Pay, Kind

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.

  Marilynne Robinson

  People, Childhood, Imagine

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

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• Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it's hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Religious, Borders, Madness

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

  Marilynne Robinson

  People, Scripture, Kind

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Religion, if it is genuine, is so profoundly interwoven with individual thought and experience that it is no more exhaustible than consciousness itself. And fiction whose purpose is didactic is bad no matter whether the matter to be "taught" is Christianity or the world view of Ayn Rand. It seems often to be assumed by writers that religion is a pose, meant to deceive oneself or others, or that it is a bad patch on doubt or complexity. This is only convention, however. The writers I know have a much deeper engagement with the real issues of religion.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Real, Doubt, World

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances - in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years' time - people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It's being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously generated in this country.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Country, Powerful, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• We [Americans] inherited British law, which is like the new "reforms" that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history - the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Country, Moving, Fall

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• 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

  Powerful, Struggle, Biblical

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Knowing, Ideas

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints - people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Angel, People, Example

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions - the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Writing, People, Different

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Interesting, Doubt, May

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

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• The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Thinking, Years

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• John Calvin's theology emphasizes the sanctity of conscience, the sanctity of companionate marriage, and the obligation of those in power to attend to the well-being of the people in general, especially the poor. Interestingly, for the interpretation of Hamlet, for example, he forbids even the thought of revenge. This is not the Calvin of myth, but when the Elizabethans read him there was no such myth, nor would there be now, if he were read.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Revenge, People, Example

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• [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

  Soul, Visionaries, Moments

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• I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Believe, Writing, Reality

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

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• The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that's just how things are.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Beautiful, People, Abuse

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

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• 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

  Stars, Thinking, Years

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

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• There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Appreciation, Reading, Book

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people's experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it's a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don't think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Character, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Suits, Great Men, Form

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

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• One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations. There isn't much of that anymore either. There are very few poems people can recite, but there are quite a few hymns that, if you hum a few bars, people can at least come up with two verses. Many of the older hymns are very beautiful.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Beautiful, Hymns, Two

  Source: www.pbs.org

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