Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Summers Robinsonis an American novelist and essayist best known for her novels Housekeepingand Gilead...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 November 1943
CountryUnited States of America
heart eye light
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 eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact.
facts done ease
I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.
father people enemy
It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.
reality ideas knowing
The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself.
lonely night people
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
defense said posture
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
virtue offense rejecting
I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
yield order people
A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that.
art real nice
One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.
giving justice people
These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
would-be old-testament summary
If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
inspiring reason this-life
There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient
exercise fiction may
Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,
heart nursing people
I have always liked the phrase "nursing a grudge " because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.