Marilynne Robinson - Gilead (2004)

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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
There is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.

Marilynne Robinson
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Marilynne Robinson
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.

Marilynne Robinson
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.

Marilynne Robinson
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
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

Marilynne Robinson
There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

Marilynne Robinson
I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

Marilynne Robinson
Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, "Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.

Marilynne Robinson
It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.

Marilynne Robinson
He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required

Marilynne Robinson
Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.

Marilynne Robinson
There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient

Marilynne Robinson
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
And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

Marilynne Robinson
You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us. I hope you never have to long for a child as I did, but oh, what a splendid thing it has been that you came finally, and what a blessing to enjoy you now for almost seven years.

Marilynne Robinson
I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

Marilynne Robinson
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.

Marilynne Robinson
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.

Marilynne Robinson