Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
World
Passing
Fingers
Finally
Spirit
Mutable
Look
Housekeeping
Come
Tangible
Looks
Mars
Every
Passings
More quotes by Marilynne Robinson
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
[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
It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.
Marilynne Robinson
Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.
Marilynne Robinson
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
Marilynne Robinson
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
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
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
She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.
Marilynne Robinson
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
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
It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time.
Marilynne Robinson
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact.
Marilynne Robinson
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
My politics, and my religion as well, are based entirely on the loveliness and value of ordinary human lives. The creaky apparatus called politics shelters or oppresses or threatens these lives, and is therefore of interest.
Marilynne Robinson
People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.
Marilynne Robinson
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.
Marilynne Robinson
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
I have always liked the phrase nursing a grudge because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.
Marilynne Robinson
Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
Marilynne Robinson
