Marilynne Robinson Quotes

You realize Shakespeare wasn't stuck for an idea when he said, 'All the world's a stage.'

No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

Anything one can do to provoke and inspire an interest in the works of Shakespeare in a young audience is fair game. Anything.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you don't need to do anything to Shakespeare.

There's this artistic drive or something in me that impels me to sympathize with villains, but it's maybe not a great impulse as someone who wants to do activism as well.

I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.

Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

I firmly believe that we're all good people, but sometimes it's hard to understand how to do good.

Evil gives you far more strings to pull. But I must say that I have never been interested in the psychology of evil, not in the slightest. Perhaps I'm not interested in evil, but in the dark sides of human beings.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.