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"There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them."
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"Brokenness a result of bitterness."

"Your gaze fixated on him, my imagination deducing your conclusion. The agony sets in, this pain is unsurpassable with despair adjoining. But I can feel my heart knocking against my chest. So I'll attempt to push ahead for my behalf."

"Grief gives you a hundred reasons to cry; hope gives you a thousand reasons to smile, joy gives you a million reasons to laugh, and love gives you billion reasons to rejoice."

"Bitterness is a broken spirit."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson

"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."

"Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought."

"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 allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing."

"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...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace."

"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."

"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."

"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."

"The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I've thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. 'The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.' That's a fact."

"The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art."
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