Quotes About Marilynne

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005,

My first novel, 'Housekeeping,' was accepted by the first agent who read it, and bought by the first editor who read it. In general, my experience with publication has been gentle and gratifying.

I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with.

I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time

We are culturally predisposed to sheltering criticism from criticism; we have enshrined the iconoclast

I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say, I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.

I could probably not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.

I think it is notable in this connection that it is not Adam but the Lord who rebukes Cain.

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.

To condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.

Musing thus, she set out upon on her widowhood, and became altogether as good a widow as she had been a wife.

A shabby fellow with a furtive air can be as gallant as the next man, depending on circumstances.

So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist.

It could be true that my interest in abstractions, which would have been forgiven first on grounds of youth and then on grounds of eccentricity, is now being forgiven on grounds of senility

I really despise the pathos of being found asleep at odd times in odd places.

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.

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

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

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.