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"I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches."
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"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
"Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers."
"To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common."
"We live that we might have experience; that through it we might gain wisdom, compassion, faith, and inner strength."
"Failure is only an experience. Experience is the foundation of any success."
"Today's experience is necessary to equip you fully for the future."
"Experience comes from failure and success comes from experience. Today's pain will bring tomorrow's gain."
"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"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."
"We are supposed to believe [capitalist ideology] was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. If there was such a champion, might it not have been freedom itself, as realized in the institutional forms of democracy? This is not how the story has been told. We are t believe it was an economic system, capitalism, that arrayed its forces against its opposite, communism, and rescued all we hold dear. Yet in the new era... [capitalism] has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment, and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens."
"Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters."
"When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists."
"I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I'm very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept me alone until your mother came. 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."
"It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water."
"Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view."
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