Marilynne Robinson Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

• 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?

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Justice, Needs

  FaceBook post by Marilynne Robinson from Feb 14, 2014

• I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Beautiful, Memories, Hate

• We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Poor, Explanation

• --"There is no justice in love...it is only the glimpse or parable of an incomprehensible reality... the eternal breaking in on the the temporal.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Justice, Glimpse

  "Gilead". Book by Marilynne Robinson, books.google.ru. May 7, 2009.

• The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Knowing, Ideas

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Dream, Thinking, Reality

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Thinking, Years

• I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that's not how I understand morality. I much prefer the "everyone is sacred, and everybody errs" model of reality.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Thinking, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Believe, Writing, Reality

  "One of Obama’s Favorite Writers Redefines Spirituality". Interview with Gregory Barber, www.motherjones.com. October 25, 2015.

• It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Mean, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Character, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition - there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry - both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Religious, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• We have demythologized prematurely, that we've actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Reality, Vocabulary, Opposites

  Source: www.pbs.org

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