620 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

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

I think a Christian definition of the mind should be: an openness to whatever the individual and collective mind reveals to us.

Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.

It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

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

I really can't claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I'm always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I'm very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don't have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak.

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 think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.