List of Marilynne Robinson Quotes

More Generally, People Who Lived In A Period When Maternal, Infant And Childhood Mortality Were Still High Would Have Been Tougher Than Most Of Us Can Imagine.

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.

Anybody Who Has Read Any Biblical Scholarship Knows That Every Scholar Struggles Over Completely Intractable Problems With The Original Texts, Or What They Have To Work From. It's One Of The Great, Powerful, Mysterious Objects That Have Come Down Through History. This Does Not Translate Into Literal Interpretation For Me.

I Think I Am Like Most People In Letting Myself Worry About Things That Didn't Matter. Concepts Like Quotidian And Humdrum Prevented Me For Years From Really Absorbing The Miraculous Strangeness Of Bombing Around A Star On A Tottering Planet, Of Watching The World Unfold In Time.

Limitation Is A Good Discipline Because It Discourages Inappropriate Generalization, Which Distracts Attention From The Profound, Particular Complexity That Characterizes Anything At All.

Of Course, Mysticism Is Very Hard To Isolate Because, Given The Kind Of Consciousness That I Was Sort Of Instructed In As Religious Consciousness; That Borders On Mysticism So Closely That It's Hard To Know Whether You Qualify Or Not, Or Whether Mysticism Is Artificially Isolated When It Is Treated As A Separate Thing From Experience. Obviously, Mysticism Can Be A Form Of Madness, But Then Consciousness Can Be A Form Of Madness.

Most Institutions Of Higher Learning In The West Were Founded By And For Religious Denominations. The Supposed Alienation Of Education And Faith Is A Recent Phenomenon. At The Same Time, Neither Education Nor The Lack Of It Predisposes One To Faith.

I Have Found That The Characters In My Novels Stay With Me After A Book Has Ended. I Know Them In Some Sense. I Never Map Anything Out. I Just Think Until I Am Secure In The Voice Of One Of Them, And Then Let The Character Unfold.

Isaac Watts, Of Course, Is A Hymn Writer In The Tradition Of Congregationalism Who Lived In The Seventeenth And Early Eighteenth Century. He Is Very Interesting And Important Because He Was Also A Metaphysician. He Knew A Great Deal About What Was, For Him, Contemporary Science. He Was Very Much Influenced By Isaac Newton, For Example. There Are Planets And Meteors And So On Showing Up In His Hymns Very Often. But, Again, The Scale Of His Religious Imagination Corresponds To A Very Generously Scaled Scientific Imagination.

The Mind Has A Complex Life That Can Seem Quite Autonomous - Dreams, Obsessions, Unwilled Memory Are All Instances Of This.

I Am Delighted If People Find That Kind Of Sustenance In Novels, But Perhaps It's Because They Don't Read The Scripture That They Are Comparing It To, Which Would Perhaps Provide Deeper Sustenance Than Many Contemporary Novels.

The Model For Our Early Bankruptcy Laws Was Deuteronomy, The Idea That, Under Certain Circumstances - In Deuteronomy, It Is Simply The Passage Of Seven Years' Time - People Are Released From Debt, Simply Because They Are Released From Debt. No More Debt. You Start Over Again. This Has Been A Very Powerful Model In This Country. It's Being Destroyed Now. People Talk About How Much New Employment, New Wealth, And So On Are Continuously Generated In This Country.