620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

I thought I had learned not to set my heart on anything.

...you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own.

The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.

I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people's experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it's a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don't think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology.

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within... Nothing is more essential to us.