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There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.

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
Eye
Hands
Precious
Nothing
Harm
Great
Bear
Things
Bears
Honor
Beauty
Eyes

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West.
Marilynne Robinson
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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.
Marilynne Robinson
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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.
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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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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Grace has a grand laughter in it.
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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You have to live with your mind your whole life.
Marilynne Robinson
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I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.
Marilynne Robinson
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Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
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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It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
Marilynne Robinson
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[John] Calvin treats experience as essentially visionary and revelatory from moment to moment, addressed to the individual perceiver, the individual soul. Where this is assumed preconceptions can only distract and obscure, though, of course, as human beings we can never wholly free ourselves of them.
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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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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Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
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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When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
Marilynne Robinson