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Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
People
Cheerful
Tour
Absolutes
Absolute
Seem
Brainless
Church
Packaged
Seems
Tourists
Like
Churches

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Put yourself out of your misery.
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We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
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Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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