Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

About Marilynne Robinson:

Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She has received several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 and the 2012 National Humanities Medal.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.

Marilynne Robinson

Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls...

Marilynne Robinson

If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I'm sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy. And probably a little bit surprised. If there is no Lord, then things are just the way ...

Marilynne Robinson

He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn't even know he wanted, and here it was.

Marilynne Robinson

She knew better than to waste that time. There isn't always someone who wants you singing to him or nibbling his ear or brushing his cheek with a dandelion blossom. Somebody who knows when you're being silly, and laughs and laughs. So long as he was ...

Marilynne Robinson

Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools' errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.

Marilynne Robinson

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of...

Marilynne Robinson

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

Marilynne Robinson

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power ...

Marilynne Robinson

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch ...

Marilynne Robinson

The broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global

Marilynne Robinson

We live in a moment in which old conflicts, much altered during their subterraneous years, have boiled up again. The struggle to own the past so that it can be made to serve contemporary interests has led to gross distortions. But it is true also tha...

Marilynne Robinson

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minor...

Marilynne Robinson

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.

Marilynne Robinson

Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word:Read.

Marilynne Robinson

I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost t...

Marilynne Robinson

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

Marilynne Robinson

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starti...

Marilynne Robinson

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.

Marilynne Robinson

Author Bio

  • NameMarilynne Robinson
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist and essayist
  • BornNovember 26, 1943
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksHousekeeping; Gilead; Home
  • AwardsHemingway Foundation/PEN Award; National Book Critics Circle Award; Pulitzer Prize For Fiction; National Humanities Medal