Marilynne Robinson Quotes

From the time I started school, it was clear to everyone that I wasn't learning at the same pace as other kids.

I don't learn so good, no matter how good the teacher is.

In retrospect, I think I had some kind of learning disorder. I could kind of charm my way through grade school, but in high school... I could never seem to grasp things.

It was like a heart transplant. We tried to implant college in him but his head rejected it.

I wasn't very good at school and couldn't get my head round it.

If you desire ease, forsake learning.

School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn.

I was not good in school. I could never read very fast or very well. I got tested for learning disabilities, for dyslexia. Then I got put on Ritalin and Dexedrine. I took those starting in the eighth grade. As soon as they pumped that drug into me, it would focus me right in.

School and I never seemed to walk hand in hand.

I studied at university for a term and a day, and then I dropped out.

Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder.

Getting an education is an awfully wearing process!

Boyhood is distracted for years with precepts of grammar that are infinitely prolix, perplexed and obscure.

Being the first person to go to college that really related to me from the movie [The Butler] because being black and going to college everyone puts so much hope into you.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

To be totally candid, it was really born out of a panic attack the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I realized I wasn't going to graduate in four years unless I somehow managed to glue together all the courses I'd taken. That said, I'm really glad I did it, 'cause it was really fun, and I was able to just take whatever the hell I wanted.

Do not ask if a man has been through college; ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university.

The first time a student realizes that a little learning is a dangerous thing is when he brings home a poor report card.

Before I myself went to college I had never seen but one college woman. I had heard that such a woman was staying at the house of an acquaintance. I went to see her with fear. Even if she had appeared in hoofs and horns I was determined to go to college all the same. But it was a relief to find this Vassar graduate tall and handsome and dressed like other women.

I didn't go to college. I got tired of it. I didn't want to take ballroom dance taught by a former drill sergeant in the WACs. I didn't like flunking speech, me, flunking speech. But I realized sometime later, okay, I don't have a piece of paper that says I've been educated, so I'm gonna have to be able to demonstrate that I'm educated. So I began self-teaching. It was all related to desire.

I went to the University of Virginia and I came from, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia.

I was never good at sports. I was never good at exams, because they didn't understand dyslexia.

Johnny can get down and Johnny can throw up, but Johnny can't read.

The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

I didn't go to college, but if I did, I would've taken all my tests at a restaurant, 'cause 'The customer is always right'.