Quote

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

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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
Experience
Pass
Music
Failure
Ever
Instead
Come
Saying
Think
Humanity
Admired
Thinking
Literature
Passed
Pain
Privilege
Everyone
Difficulty

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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I don't think I would worry about an oversaturation of information if it was indeed information. It is the slovenly, hasty traffic in cliché and sensationalism and bad reasoning that bothers me. I love finding arcane primary texts on the web. The people who think to put them up are heroes of mine.
Marilynne Robinson
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There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.
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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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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I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.
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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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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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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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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I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.
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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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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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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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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Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
Marilynne Robinson
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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.
Marilynne Robinson
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If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
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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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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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