Top Marilynne Robinson Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Marilynne Robinson Biography

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. During her writing career Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, the 2012 National Humanities Medal, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016 Robinson was named in Time Magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991, and retired in the spring of 2016.

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Marilynne Robinson Quotes

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

Exceeds, Imagination, Religious, Thinking, World

Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.

Blessed, Ideas, Miracle, Remember, Time, Waiting

The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.

Calvin, John, Reality, Thinking, Years

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.

Allowing, Excursions, Order, People, Things, Yield

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

Believe, Cursory, Reality, Usually, Writing

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

Compose, Kind, Mystery, People, Thinking, Writing

I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.

Hero, People, Slovenly, Think, Thinking, Worry

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

Degrees, Fiction, Like, Objective, School

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

Clear, Fighter, Fighters, Hardship

The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that's just how things are.

Abuse, Beautiful, Human, People, Things, Ways

It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

Fashion, Years, People, Lookin

When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.

Accept, Accepting, Community, Dismissive, Judgment

Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.

Assuming, Conventionalism, Protect You, Reader, Smarter, Writing

I'm really disturbed by the degree to which I don't hear people saying, "Are we leaving the world better than we found it?" I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

Evasion, People, Refusing, Responsibility, Thinking

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

Company, Good Things, Know, Poor

When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints - people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical.

Angel, Aquinas, Example, Hierarchy, People, Thomas

It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.

Anyway, Good, Learn, Life, Missing, Quiet

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

Alone, Believe, Discovery, Impossible, Loneliness

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

Loss, Memories, Memory, Pulls, Sense

One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations. There isn't much of that anymore either. There are very few poems people can recite, but there are quite a few hymns that, if you hum a few bars, people can at least come up with two verses. Many of the older hymns are very beautiful.

Beautiful, Hymns, Two, Anymore, Bars

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