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"She knew there were words so terrible you heard them with your whole body. Guilty. And there were voices to say them. She knew there were people you might almost trust who would hear them, too, and be amazed, and still not really hear them because they know they were not the ones the words were spoken to."
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Exlpore more Psychology quotes
"Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ['Not without the past']"
"Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew."
"And is usually true of a man of one idea, [Charles] became obsessed."
"The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to-instead of them-change reality."
"There is no such thing as a boring person when you are lonely or extremely bored."
"I am a mask, concealing the real."
"To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic."
"The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from."
"Happiness is something that you establish before a relationship. It is not the relationship that establishes it first."
"Comparison more than reality makes men happy or wretched."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms."
"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've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."
"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."
"I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me."
"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."
"Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall."
"So she prayed, Lord, give me patience. She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it....it cost her tears to think that her situation might actually be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding--for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her to preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven's sake."
"We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself."
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