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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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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 80
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Looks
Mars
Every
Passings
World
Passing
Fingers
Finally
Spirit
Mutable
Look
Housekeeping
Come
Tangible

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.
Marilynne Robinson
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I had been reading about [John] Calvin for years and had been studying the English Renaissance for many more years, and it had never occurred to me to think of them together. I learned that Calvin was the most widely read writer in England in Shakespeare's lifetime. He was translated and published in many editions.
Marilynne Robinson
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Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
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
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And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.
Marilynne Robinson
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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
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Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
Marilynne Robinson
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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
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--There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.
Marilynne Robinson
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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
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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.
Marilynne Robinson
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This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give 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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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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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
Marilynne Robinson
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Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
Marilynne Robinson