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
men people pity
It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
children writing men
I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
suits great-men form
Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
men understanding world
The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.
men becoming salvation
Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.
men important leisure
It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
eye men thinking
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.
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.
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.
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.