We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. Marilynne Robinson More Quotes by Marilynne Robinson More Quotes From Marilynne Robinson 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 together two world 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 alchemy darkness life-is 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 have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally? Marilynne Robinson aunt law fall 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 nature two people 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. Marilynne Robinson epic believe world 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. Marilynne Robinson teacher school thinking 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. Marilynne Robinson blessed waiting ideas 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. Marilynne Robinson apology expectations waiting It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science. Marilynne Robinson diversity arrogance culture 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 mars looks world I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with. Marilynne Robinson disagree impulse 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. Marilynne Robinson degrees fiction school That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth. Marilynne Robinson praying-for-you intimacy praying When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests. Marilynne Robinson judgment accepting community 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? Marilynne Robinson encounters asking thinking 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. Marilynne Robinson advise worst levels 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. Marilynne Robinson eye dream fall It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146) Marilynne Robinson atheist religious self A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. Marilynne Robinson imagine too-much littles 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. Marilynne Robinson eye philosophy book
