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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

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
World
Judge
Judging
Atheism
Wouldn
Smallness
Common
Extremism
Sense
Likelihood
Nature
Existed
Believe
Atheist

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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
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I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
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