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

Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet.

Marilynne Robinson

Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for us as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.

Marilynne Robinson

The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the ey...

Marilynne Robinson

There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

Marilynne Robinson

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday mo...

Marilynne Robinson

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

Marilynne Robinson

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient

Marilynne Robinson

...when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.

Marilynne Robinson

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.

Marilynne Robinson

And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they couldn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

Marilynne Robinson

She kept saying, "My husband will be back soon. He went for help. He'll be back." But that's the kind of lie people tell sometimes when they got only strangers to rely on. There's shame in that, so people lie.

Marilynne Robinson

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowl...

Marilynne Robinson

Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.

Marilynne Robinson

My Calvinism persuades me that we are open to God, in the sense that we are not delimited, not organisms with fixed attributes in the manner of the other creatures, but are instead participants in a reality that utterly exceeds our powers of descript...

Marilynne Robinson

I don't claim to know what it means to say that we are made in the image of God, but I profoundly and instinctively believe it and all that it implies.

Marilynne Robinson

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

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 th...

Marilynne Robinson

The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within... Nothing is more essential to us.

Marilynne Robinson

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.

Marilynne Robinson

My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact.

Marilynne Robinson

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.

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