Quote

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.

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
Hope
Interests
Best
Judgment
Accept
Capable
Dismissive
Accepting
Judgments
Stop
Serving
Community
Generous
Interest
Cease

More quotes by 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.
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Most institutions of higher learning in the West were founded by and for religious denominations. The supposed alienation of education and faith is a recent phenomenon. At the same time, neither education nor the lack of it predisposes one to faith.
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... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.
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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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The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.
Marilynne Robinson
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I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.
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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Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.
Marilynne Robinson
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Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.
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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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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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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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 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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Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
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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Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.
Marilynne Robinson
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. . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.
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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The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.
Marilynne Robinson