{"author":"Marilynne Robinson","author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson","total_quotes":156,"quotes":[{"text":"When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? ... This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["christianity","faith","religion"],"id":2246,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don't add up. They don't even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["existence","god","life"],"id":9982,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"...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.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["beauty","condescension"],"id":10233,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"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.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["forgiveness","grace","understanding"],"id":12114,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"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.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["joy"],"id":12675,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["america","calvinism","charity","grace","liberal","liberality","poor","usa"],"id":15037,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"I know more than I know and must learn it from myself.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["knowledge","self"],"id":18596,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["dawn","death","heaven","morning","sunrise"],"id":21226,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["glimpse","god","love"],"id":22485,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"},{"text":"I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.","author":"Marilynne Robinson","tags":["christianity","god","god-s-love","grace"],"id":23055,"author_id":"Marilynne+Robinson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":156,"pages":16,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}