Quotes from Marilynne Robinson

My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

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.

I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It's the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do.

I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.

The Bible for me is holy writ. It's a very straightforward thing, although I am not a literalist.

... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.

--"There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.

It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.

The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.

You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings.

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

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.

It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.

I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology.

One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.

Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.

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.

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.