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

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.
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For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.
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Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.
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I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.
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Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.
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When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.
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This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
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Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
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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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I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that's not how I understand morality. I much prefer the everyone is sacred, and everybody errs model of reality.
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People don't acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don't appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.
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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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If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
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We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.
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I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
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I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
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Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy.
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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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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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Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
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