Bogwitch

Marilynne Robinson ↘↖

We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

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Marilynne Robinson (via ayjay)

Yes yes yes yes yes.

18 February 2012 • reblog: ayjay • science Christianity Marilynne Robinson

If you feel that Catholicism or Christianity or religion is not represented, by detractors or defenders, in ways that honor its profundity and beauty, live out its profundity and beauty. To do this is more telling than any argument.

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Marilynne Robinson (via wesleyhill)

True words.

29 August 2011 • reblog: wesleyhill • Christianity Marilynne Robinson

The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him… He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. … At such times he was…forgetful of her…, but all the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.

— from Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson

17 December 2010 • literature Marilynne Robinson love nature

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

— from Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson

20 November 2010 • Marilynne Robinson family literature love people

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

— from Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson

17 November 2010 • literature Marilynne Robinson

Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.

— from Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

27 June 2010 • literature Gilead Marilynne Robinson

To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise.

— from Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

24 June 2010 • church literature Gilead Marilynne Robinson

But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.

— from Gilead
by Marianne Robinson

22 June 2010 • literature Gilead Marilynne Robinson nature

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.

— from Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

14 June 2010 • Gilead Marilynne Robinson literature memory

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean the most to you…

…

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

— from Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson

5 June 2010 • Gilead Marilynne Robinson literature people