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
above great heroes love
My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.
love-you existence remarkable
... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.
love-is needs doe
God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.
love-is what-matters grace
Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
clear creating milton pleasure shakespeare took
When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil.
believe god means profoundly
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.
actual family inherited mainly pious
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.
education kept nonfiction serious
Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
almost claim detail familiar otherwise paint rooms
I like to read in my own house, in any of the rooms I always mean to paint or otherwise improve and never do. Every detail is so familiar to me that it makes almost no claim on my attention.
became exposed interested meant unusual writers
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, starting with Emerson.
demands helps otherwise
When I lecture, under almost all circumstances, I write a new lecture for the occasion. It helps me think. It helps me make demands of myself that I would not otherwise make.
fact interested somehow sort
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.
collective definition mind openness reveals whatever
I think a Christian definition of the mind should be: an openness to whatever the individual and collective mind reveals to us.
I don't think I could write a novel that wasn't theological.