Marilynne Robinson

“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.”

“It is one of the best traits of people that they love where they pity. And this is more true of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a way, Christlike.”

“[T]hat was the first time in my life I ever felt that what I thought I was amounted to the clothes on my back and the books on my shelves and the calendar I kept full of obligations waiting and obligations fulfilled. As I have said, it was a foretaste of death, at least of dying. And why should that seem strange? ‘Passion’ is the word we use, after all.”

Gilead (2004)