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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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Marilynne Robinson
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 26
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Sandpoint
Idaho
Marilynne Summers Robinson
Marilynne S. Robinson
Think
Stars
Miraculous
Quotidian
Thinking
Didn
Letting
Tottering
Like
Around
Concepts
Humdrum
World
Matter
Star
Strangeness
People
Years
Planet
Prevented
Really
Watching
Unfold
Things
Planets
Absorbing
Time
Worry
Bombing

More quotes by 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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These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
Marilynne Robinson
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This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.
Marilynne Robinson
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Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
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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Most institutions of higher learning in the West were founded by and for religious denominations. The supposed alienation of education and faith is a recent phenomenon. At the same time, neither education nor the lack of it predisposes one to faith.
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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You have to live with your mind your whole life.
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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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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. . . there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.
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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Christianity is a life, not a doctrine . . . I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own.
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'm amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don't know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.
Marilynne Robinson
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The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.
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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For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.
Marilynne Robinson
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When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.
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