Marilynne Robinson Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.”

“I don't think I could write a novel that wasn't theological.”

“I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.”

“My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.”

“My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.”

“Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”