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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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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Someone
Better
Condescend
Ever
Clich
Writing
Smarter
Never
Assume
Assuming
Reader
Protect

More quotes by 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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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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Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
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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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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... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.
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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Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
Marilynne Robinson
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Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.
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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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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Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
Marilynne Robinson
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For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.
Marilynne Robinson
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God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of holy, so that we can feel and know the presense of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence.
Marilynne Robinson
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We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.
Marilynne Robinson
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For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.
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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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 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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I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone.
Marilynne Robinson