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
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.
suits great-men form
Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
kindness home giving
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
embarrassment
What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.
loneliness vision faces
Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.
impulse disagree
I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with.
hymns deals
I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.
readers simply time work
Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.
hardest west work
I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.
learned
I've learned a lot about writing from listening to my students talk.
couch decision essential gave rid turns work
I used to write on a big old couch, but I gave that away. I was wise enough to give it to my son, so if it turns out that the couch was essential to my work, at least the decision to be rid of it is not irreversible.
attributes calvinism fixed god instead manner organisms powers utterly
My Calvinism persuades me that we are open to God, in the sense that we are not delimited, not organisms with fixed attributes in the manner of the other creatures, but are instead participants in a reality that utterly exceeds our powers of description.
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.
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.