Marilynne Robinson

“the worst misfortune isn’t only misfortune”

— Marilynne Robinson

Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

— Marilynne Robinson

“I know more than I know and must learn it from myself.”

— Marilynne Robinson

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

— Marilynne Robinson

You have to live with your mind your whole life.

— Marilynne Robinson

Light is constant, we just turn over in it.

— Marilynne Robinson

It is hardship that makes clear who the "fighters" are.

— Marilynne Robinson

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

— Marilynne Robinson

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

— Marilynne Robinson

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

— Marilynne Robinson

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

— Marilynne Robinson

I've learned a lot about writing from listening to my students talk.

— Marilynne Robinson

“It is clearly true that the reflex of disparagement is no more compatible with rigorous inquiry than the impulse to glorify.”

— Marilynne Robinson

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

— Marilynne Robinson

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

— Marilynne Robinson

“Chimerical grief — now guilt, now blame, now the thought that it could all have been otherwise. ~ Glory”

— Marilynne Robinson

I doubt that I could create a character I loathed simply because when a character takes life, it is impossible not to…

— Marilynne Robinson

“All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in…

— Marilynne Robinson

“Your mother asked him if he would like to say grace, and he did, with an elegant simplicity that seemed almost wasted…

— Marilynne Robinson

“At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.”

— Marilynne Robinson

To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human…

— Marilynne Robinson

Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am…

— Marilynne Robinson

“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a…

— Marilynne Robinson

“The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he…

— Marilynne Robinson

“Before I was born she had bought herself a new home health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was…

— Marilynne Robinson

People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in…

— Marilynne Robinson

“He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank…

— Marilynne Robinson

[John] Calvin treats experience as essentially visionary and revelatory from moment to moment, addressed to the individual perceiver, the individual soul. Where…

— Marilynne Robinson

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the…

— Marilynne Robinson

We have demythologized prematurely, that we've actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is…

— Marilynne Robinson

“Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He…

— Marilynne Robinson

A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a…

— Marilynne Robinson

“I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be…

— Marilynne Robinson

“I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love…

— Marilynne Robinson

“If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were,…

— Marilynne Robinson

“The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we…

— Marilynne Robinson

“Again the starter and the engine, and after a minute or two the rattle and pop of gravel as the DeSoto eased…

— Marilynne Robinson

“We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial…

— Marilynne Robinson

“I had a dream once that Boughton and I were down at the river looking around in the shallows for something or…

— Marilynne Robinson

The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that…

— Marilynne Robinson