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Marilynne Robinson Quotes
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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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We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.
Marilynne Robinson
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Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
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Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
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This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
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There is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.
Marilynne Robinson
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Pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet.
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I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God's grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.
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That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.
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It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.
Marilynne Robinson
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She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere." It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.
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I think the essence of family is that you have to agree to it, and then supply, out of your imagination and capacity for loyalty, the contents of it.
Marilynne Robinson
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I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.
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I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
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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.
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It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.
Marilynne Robinson
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For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.
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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.
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It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it... so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.
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And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.
Marilynne Robinson
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When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.
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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 basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.
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There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.
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Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
Marilynne Robinson
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Marilynne Robinson
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Born:
November 26, 1943
(age 80)
Bio:
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist best known for her novels Housekeeping and Gilead.
Known for:
Gilead (2004)
Housekeeping (1980)
When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012)
Most used words:
people
life
fact
light
love
time
human
hope
understand
feel
true
forgive
remember
wonder
eyes
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