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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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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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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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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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Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
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The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
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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. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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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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Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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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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Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.
Annie Dillard