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Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

Marilynne Robinson

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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Sympathy
Capacity
Exercise
Fiction
Whatever
Else
May
Identification
Love
Imaginative

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.
Marilynne Robinson
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I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
Marilynne Robinson
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When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.
Marilynne Robinson
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Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.
Marilynne Robinson
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I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.
Marilynne Robinson
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The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
Marilynne Robinson
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The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
Marilynne Robinson
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Many times when I stop working on a problem consciously, my mind continues to work on it below the surface. Often solutions come on me quite by surprise. I've learned over time to allow that to happen, rather than to feel that I can simply solve the problem by continuous, grueling effort.
Marilynne Robinson
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Rejoice with those who rejoice. I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.
Marilynne Robinson
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Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
Marilynne Robinson
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A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
Marilynne Robinson
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Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.
Marilynne Robinson
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I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
Marilynne Robinson
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I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.
Marilynne Robinson
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A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
Marilynne Robinson
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I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.
Marilynne Robinson
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Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
Marilynne Robinson
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These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
Marilynne Robinson
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Somebody who had read Lila asked me, ‘Why do you write about the problem of loneliness?’ I said: ‘It’s not a problem. It’s a condition. It’s a passion of a kind. It’s not a problem. I think that people make it a problem by interpreting it that way.’
Marilynne Robinson
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Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
Marilynne Robinson