Quote

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.

Marilynne Robinson

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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 80
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Doe
Whenever
Find
Limits
Might
Grace
Human
Imagination
Humans
Since
Exceeds
Love
Religious
Exceed
Thinking
Experience
Utterly
World
Certain
Dread

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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.
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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.
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If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
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God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.
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It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
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You have to live with your mind your whole life.
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There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.
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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?
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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.
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You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.
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We have demythologized prematurely, that we've actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
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This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is ... So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.
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Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.
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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.
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These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
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This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
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That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.
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Christianity is a life, not a doctrine . . . I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own.
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Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
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I'm amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don't know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.
Marilynne Robinson