Marilynne Robinson Quotes

Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

Creation and destruction are one, to the eyes who can see beauty.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

People who do not see the terrible things therefore do not see the beautiful things, either.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

Shadow owes its birth to light.

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.

Sometimes he could almost forget that it was there, the way you forget about the sky or the earth underfoot, but there were other times when it seemed as if there was nothing else in the world.

It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight.

Whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world?

When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, There arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, There arises the recognition of evil.

Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

It's a sad and beautiful world.

Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.

truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.

You cannot dissociate birth from death, creation from destruction, good from evil. Thus any art is a form of drama standing between the two extreme poles of birth and death, just like life is drama. This is not sad, because to be alive means to be mortal, to pass through.

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

And the visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.