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57fc6c3
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I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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a67bdad
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I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God's grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.
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god
god-s-love
grace
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Marilynne Robinson |
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55b7573
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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.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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581baf1
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For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. 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 han..
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loss
needs
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Marilynne Robinson |
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34c8a4c
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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."
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Marilynne Robinson |
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64e1079
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It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. [E]very 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 final..
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Marilynne Robinson |
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0644ecd
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I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
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courage
prayer
world
kindness
jesus
god
life
love
inspirational
fortitude
praying
brave
prudence
precious
stewardship
grace
kind
pray
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Marilynne Robinson |
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3ce3053
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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.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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b627f8d
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It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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f856dab
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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.
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fathers
relationships
sons
generations
knowledge
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Marilynne Robinson |
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ef5d5b3
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People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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cf31d3c
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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.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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899af43
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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.
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death
life
conception
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Marilynne Robinson |
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c254540
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When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my fa..
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marilynne-robinson
grace
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Marilynne Robinson |
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0802171
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Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allo..
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courage
kindness
life
love
generous
brave
stewardship
giving
grace
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Marilynne Robinson |
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167671b
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It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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1c157cc
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She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere." It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health."
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Marilynne Robinson |
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4e17004
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The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
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Marilynne Robinson |
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cda2b8a
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not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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f32ec46
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He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required
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Marilynne Robinson |
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0007545
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Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground--a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of ..
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Marilynne Robinson |
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5ac75be
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That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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1a06e5f
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I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books,..
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words
literature
reading
poetry
writers
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Marilynne Robinson |
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a143f4a
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Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts..
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Marilynne Robinson |
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28505a1
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Light is constant, we just turn over in it.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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95152d5
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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."
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Marilynne Robinson |
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ff8e518
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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.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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eacb50a
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Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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7a6a17b
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This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is... So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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084d069
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I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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53d1b7d
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there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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76f28c8
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That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.
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prayer
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Marilynne Robinson |
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6988450
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I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word "good" so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment "when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy," but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they ..
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Marilynne Robinson |
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e496590
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When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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e8e646e
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She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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ab4ad59
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Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what i was waiting for.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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e277e82
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My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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9abef4d
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I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.
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reality
thinking
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Marilynne Robinson |
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f15ac0a
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I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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9a67427
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What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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a7275ed
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Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.
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Marilynne Robinson |
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c201e62
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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.
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faith
religion
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Marilynne Robinson |
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3a132b8
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That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the sou..
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Marilynne Robinson |
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7cbf4bc
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It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.
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Marilynne Robinson |