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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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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Mean
Remember
Ordinary
Even
May
Taking
Believe
Wells
Courses
Things
Well
Course
Never
Matter
Child
Would
Many
Anyone
Think
Hard
Tell
Thinking
Children
Order
Matters

More quotes by 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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He [Christ] even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.
Marilynne Robinson
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It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.
Marilynne Robinson
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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
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Many times when I stop working on a problem consciously, my mind continues to work on it below the surface. Often solutions come on me quite by surprise. I've learned over time to allow that to happen, rather than to feel that I can simply solve the problem by continuous, grueling effort.
Marilynne Robinson
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Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.
Marilynne Robinson
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When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
Marilynne Robinson
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We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson
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I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.
Marilynne Robinson
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For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.
Marilynne Robinson
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Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.
Marilynne Robinson
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Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
Marilynne Robinson
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The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it.
Marilynne Robinson
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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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It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible - incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.
Marilynne Robinson
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I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.
Marilynne Robinson
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Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
Marilynne Robinson
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Grace has a grand laughter in it.
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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When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.
Marilynne Robinson