Marilynne Robinson Quotes

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

Time is the substance of which we are made

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

Light is time thinking about itself.

We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.

Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.

You see everything is about belief, whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life.

It is a remarkable question- Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?

Reality is the completion of experience.

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

Repetition doesn't really exist

The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.