Top 15 Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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

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

I remember when I was a child... walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle.

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

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 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.

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

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

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.