The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.
Marilynne RobinsonLove is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
Marilynne RobinsonThe old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.
Marilynne RobinsonI got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things.
Marilynne RobinsonI hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.
Marilynne RobinsonReligion, if it is genuine, is so profoundly interwoven with individual thought and experience that it is no more exhaustible than consciousness itself. And fiction whose purpose is didactic is bad no matter whether the matter to be "taught" is Christianity or the world view of Ayn Rand. It seems often to be assumed by writers that religion is a pose, meant to deceive oneself or others, or that it is a bad patch on doubt or complexity. This is only convention, however. The writers I know have a much deeper engagement with the real issues of religion.
Marilynne Robinson