Marilynne Robinson Quotes

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Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Children seem to think that every pleasant thing has to be a surprise. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
You never bother me, Glory. It's remarkable how much you don't bother me. Almost unprecedented. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
A sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one - and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form - is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Certainly the death of Christ has been understood as expiation for human sin through the whole length of church history, and I defer with all possible sincerity to the central tenets of the Christian tradition, but as for myself, I confess that I struggle to understand the phenomenon of ritual sacrifice, and the Crucifixion when explicated in its terms. The concept is so central to the tradition that I have no desire to take issue with it, and so difficult for me that I leave it for others to interpret. If it answered to a deep human need at other times, and it answers now to other spirits than mine, then it is a great kindness of God toward them, and a great proof of God's attentive grace toward his creatures. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
I talked once with a cabdriver who had spent years in prison. He said he had no idea that the world was something he could be interested in. And then he read a book. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
And as we glided across the ice toward Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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There's a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man, with all the defects and injuries of what is called long life faithfully preserved in him, and all their claims and all their tendencies honored, too … I have thought sometimes that the Lord must hold the whole of our lives in memory, so to speak. Of course He does. And 'memory' is the wrong word, no doubt. But the finger I broke sliding into second base when I was twenty-two years old is crookeder than ever, and I can interpret that fact as an intimate attention, taking [George] Herbert's view. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Her father was soothed by these attentions, as if pain were an appetite for comforting of just this kind. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something - Being - having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether - if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I always tell my students that you can do anything you can get away with, that implausibility is a problem of style. If people bring issues of plausibility to bear on what you're doing, you're not doing it well enough. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
So I decided a little waltzing would be very good, and it was. I plan to do all my waltzing here in the study. I have thought I might have a book ready at hand to clutch if I began to experience unusual pain, so that would have been a special recommendation from being found in my hands. That seems theatrical, on consideration, and it might have the perverse effective of burdening the book with unpleasant associations. The ones I considered, by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth's Epistle to the Romans and Volume II of Calvin's institutes. Which is by no means to slight volume I. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Inevitably, this is how Christianity has come to be understood by a great many good people who have no better instruction in it than they receive from ranters and politicians. Under such circumstances, it is only to their credit that they reject it. Though I am not competent to judge in such matters, it would not surprise me at all to learn in any ultimate reckoning that these "Nones" as they are called, for the box they check when asked their religion, are better Christians than the Christians. But they have not been given the chance even to reject the beautiful, generous heritage that might otherwise have come to them. The learned and uncantankerous traditions seem, as I have said, to have fallen silent, to have retreated within their walls to dabble in feckless innovation and to watch their numbers dwindle. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally? ~ Marilynne Robinson
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You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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In St. Louis one of the girls had said to her, Just pretend you're pretty so they can pretend you're pretty. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we realize that experience does not accumulate like money, or memories, or like years and frailties. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within ... Nothing is more essential to us. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Ideology is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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And I was left alone, in that gentle afternoon, indifferent to my clothes and comfortable in my skin, unimproved and without the prospect of improvement. It seemed to me then that Lucille would busy herself forever, nudging, pushing, coaxing, as if she could supply the will I lacked, to pull myself into some seemly shape and slip across the wide frontiers into that other world, where it seemed to me then I could never wish to go. For it seemed to me that nothing I had lost, or might lose, could be found there [...] ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible... it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism--exactly the same grounds, in fact--that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another's. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs and I want you to know that. Because that is the truth even if no one remembers it. To look at the lace, it's just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now. But what must Galilee have looks like? You can't tell so much from the appearance of a place. ~ 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. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Morality is a check upon the strongest temptations. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Everywhere the crisis of the private financial system has been transformed into a tale of slovenly and overweening government that perpetuates and is perpetuated by a dependent and demanding population ... For about ten days the crisis was interpreted as a consequence of the ineptitude of the highly paid, and then it transmogrified into a grudge against the populace at large. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Remembering and forgiving can be contrary things ~ Marilynne Robinson
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It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself? ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill
all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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We [Americans] inherited British law, which is like the new "reforms" that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history - the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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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
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There's a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of Mother and Father. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Scientific Socialists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis. Darwin influenced the nationalist writer Heinrich von Treitschke and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who influenced Hitler and also the milieu in which he flourished. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Oh, I am a limited man, and old, and he will still be his inexplicable mortal self when I am dust. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Musing thus, she set out upon on her widowhood, and became altogether as good a widow as she had been a wife. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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i know more than i know and must learn it from myself ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I think that to be a good writer, you have to put yourself on the line, you have to think deeply about what is meaningful to you and you have to make a good-faith effort to speak from the integrity of your own deep experience ... People don't think about assessing what is the deepest narrative for them. I think that that's about 99 percent of the subject of literature ... Write from it. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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She imagined Jack standing among the bins of nails and tool belts and the ranks of crowbars, unspoken to beyond the ordinary courtesies, seeming unaware of their awareness of him, watching flickering television in that cave full of the smells of leather and wood and oily metal, idle among all those implements of force and purpose, citified among the steel-toed boots and the work shirts. An odd place for a man to loiter who was so alive to embarrassment, so predisposed to sensing even the thought of rebuke. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Pg 102 "Maybe you don't have to think about hell because probly nobody you know going to end up there."
pg 238 "Sleep is mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something ... You had to trust sleep when it came or it would just leave you there, waiting."
Pg 253 " And if she prayed now, it was really remembering the comfort he put around her, the warmth of his body still in that coat. It was a shock to her, a need she only discovered when it was satisfied, for those few minutes. In those days she had all the needs she could stand already, and here was another one. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it's hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy? ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I used to write on a big old couch, but I gave that away. I was wise enough to give it to my son, so if it turns out that the couch was essential to my work, at least the decision to be rid of it is not irreversible. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I have thought about that very often - how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preoisterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing
the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her? ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry ... Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone's benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes? ~ Marilynne Robinson
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She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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And there I was, trudging through the same old nowhere, day after day, always wanting to slow down, to sit down, to lie down, with my father walking on ahead, no doubt a little desperate, as he had every right to be. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren't mine were Boughton's. And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth. Doane said once that he saw a cyclone cross a river. It took the water in its path up into itself and crossed on dry ground, and it was just as white as a cloud, white as snow. Something like that would only last for a minute, but it showed you what kind of thing can happen. It would shed that water and take up leaves and branches, cats and dogs, cows if it wanted to, grown men, and it would change everything they thought they knew. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It's a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can't feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it. I know they're planning to pull it down. They're waiting me out, which is kind of them. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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That's what the family is for,' he said. 'Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it. As if it came from the Lord Himself. Which it does. So I want you boys to promise me that you will help each other. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time ~ Marilynne Robinson
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There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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There's a patter in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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I really should not be so willing to interpret my own books as I seem to be this evening. But the blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too. He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do it, that Jack accepted it, wanted it. I really do believe that all blessing is mutual, and that the moment of blessing is when people rise to the very beautiful seriousness of what they are. I feel that we ought to value ourselves and one another far more than we do, and I'm speaking theologically here, but also with an awareness that always haunts me, that we are the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant - and perverse, of course. Our own overwhelming problem. But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter. If we came anywhere near respecting the richness of this improbable life - hopes would flourish and blossom as they have never done before. ~ Marilynne Robinson
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Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
She thought, If I'm crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend, and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by? And that was when the times were decent. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground
a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of his laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his creator. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
Doll always said, Just be quiet. Whatever it is, just wait for it to be over. Everything ends sometime. ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
The word "preacher" comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble? ~ Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson quotes by Marilynne Robinson
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