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

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

Marilynne Robinson

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.

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

I really enjoyed my kids. They were good boys, you know, and interesting. And they didn't wear me out.

Marilynne Robinson

My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.

Marilynne Robinson

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary...

Marilynne Robinson

The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

Marilynne Robinson

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.

Marilynne Robinson

I doubt that I could create a character I loathed simply because when a character takes life, it is impossible not to be a little amazed by the phenomenon, and to find that the amazement has something of the quality of delight.

Marilynne Robinson

Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it's also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you're trying to work on something and it's not going anywhere, you can go to school and there's a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which...

Marilynne Robinson

I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

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.

Marilynne Robinson

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

Marilynne Robinson

I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

Marilynne Robinson

I used to write on a big old couch, but I gave that away. I was wise enough to give it to my son, so if it turns out that the couch was essential to my work, at least the decision to be rid of it is not irreversible.

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