Marilynne Robinson

Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know.

Marilynne Robinson

A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.

Marilynne Robinson

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

And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they couldn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

Marilynne Robinson

Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

Marilynne Robinson

Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

Marilynne Robinson

At the very best there are two major problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.

Marilynne Robinson

Avoid transgression. How's that for advice.

Marilynne Robinson

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

Marilynne Robinson

But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.

Marilynne Robinson

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