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When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

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
Hard
Things
Matters
Ordinary
Taking
Courses
Course
Remember
Matter

More quotes by Marilynne Robinson

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The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate 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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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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I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
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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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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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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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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A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
Marilynne Robinson
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Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.
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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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
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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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Faith takes a great many forms, suited to a variety of sensibilities, and mine happens to suit me very well.
Marilynne Robinson
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I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.
Marilynne Robinson
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Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.
Marilynne Robinson
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You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.
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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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