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"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."
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Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"There's a patter in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object."
"What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?"
"When I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly."
"She kept saying, "My husband will be back soon. He went for help. He'll be back." But that's the kind of lie people tell sometimes when they got only strangers to rely on. There's shame in that, so people lie."
"It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.[E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."
"When we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels."
"We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself."
Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."
"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
"Find time to admire and appreciate the glittering lights on snowflakes."
"Always account for each unit of passing time."
"To reflect God's image is a lifestyle."
"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
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