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.
would-be old-testament summary
If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
facts done ease
I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.
loyalty father son
A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
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.
would-be identical
...not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.
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.