|
e403f96
|
There's so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.
|
|
faith
inspirational
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
d7e8440
|
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
ab1b063
|
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.
|
|
sunday-life
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
5e0dbd6
|
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 any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a 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..
|
|
loss
craving
lack
wish
shadow
need
wholeness
longing
foreshadowing
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
7c4e7f3
|
Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
|
|
love
unearned-blessings
holy
worthy
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
2394e5e
|
Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.
|
|
memory
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
e8c91ed
|
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 |
|
7d6a1f2
|
Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
f8ecba9
|
But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
114672c
|
It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
cec7378
|
I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
22bad56
|
There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
|
|
god
love
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
26bdb14
|
I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.
|
|
words
literature
reading
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
886116b
|
In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. 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 stru..
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
13490ef
|
She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.
|
|
prayer
sorrow
heartache
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
81014d4
|
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mea..
|
|
mortality
past
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
0b246de
|
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smu..
|
|
loneliness
relationships
sister
friend
safety
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
2e32094
|
Grace has a grand laughter in it.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
0b2d5a6
|
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 |
|
30cda19
|
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
9637089
|
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
549dd09
|
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected -- an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.
|
|
shadow
waiting
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
02f78a4
|
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 |
|
dfb957b
|
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 |
|
c5675a1
|
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 |
|
78018e7
|
Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
c612c41
|
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 |
|
f5356d6
|
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 |
|
668eb99
|
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 |
|
07d7a06
|
It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible -- incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.
|
|
invisibility
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
08fd995
|
It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it . . . so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
fe8288e
|
Rejoice with those who rejoice." I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep."
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
7e01a95
|
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human be..
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
b42aa05
|
Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
199dcfb
|
Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need o..
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
076e101
|
And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
455c539
|
Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
666a567
|
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 |
|
ee5c0e3
|
Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
f0a8ae4
|
There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
|
|
courage
world
kindness
life
love
inspirational
fortitude
brave
precious
stewardship
grace
deception
kind
eyes
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
1dbc171
|
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 |
|
5901fb8
|
You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.
|
|
sad
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
68be75a
|
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |
|
7059e5b
|
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
|
|
|
Marilynne Robinson |