Marilynne Robinson quotes - page 3

You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time. (Marilynne Robinson)
There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within... Nothing is more essential to us. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they're capable of from thinking in that scale is something that's really unique to theology. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
It saddens me that Christians need to be reminded that awe is owed also to those who disagree with them, who believe otherwise than they do. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything. (Marilynne Robinson)
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
Cynicism induces a state of helplessness...It disables resistance to all these ills and reduces those who can see and name them into passive collaborators.” It is used as "a kind of cover for what might otherwise seem naive”. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
As a matter of courtesy they treated one another's deceptions like truth, which was a different thing from deceiving or being deceived. In fact, it was a great part of the fabric of mutual understanding that made their family close. View quote
Marilynne Robinson
He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly did not want to have. That memory would be as unbearable as things are when there is nothing else to do but live with them. (Marilynne Robinson)
Why were there an infinite number of ways to feel awkward? He believed this was a theological question having to do with man's place in the universe. But when he felt the true force of the question, he was always in the middle of an embarrassing emergency of some kind that paralyzed reflection. View quote
Marilynne Robinson