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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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Exlpore more Experience quotes
"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
"Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation."
"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."
"Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience."
"Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around."
"We just had a near-life experience!"
"Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure."
"It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests."
"I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"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."
"How I wish you could have known me in my strength."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."
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