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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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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Create
Dispute
Comes
Disputes
Two
Crave
Also
Questions
Need
Answer
Needs
Beyond
Really
Fiction
Answers

More quotes by 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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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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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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. . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.
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
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To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.
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.
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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It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
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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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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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.
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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In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
Marilynne Robinson
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When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.
Marilynne Robinson
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The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
Marilynne Robinson
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More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.
Marilynne Robinson
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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
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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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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