Quote

By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

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
Give
Provide
Mugged
Giving
Bible
Dipping
Children
Atheism
Charms
Think
Produce
Hoped
Thinking
Serious
Jewels
Prayer
Magnificent
Quaintly
Lives
Cash
Tint
Often
Charm
Snatches

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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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As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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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 extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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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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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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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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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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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
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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.
Annie Dillard
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Annie Dillard
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard
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According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
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The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
Annie Dillard
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You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard