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

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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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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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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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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
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I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
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The life of sensation is the life of greed it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
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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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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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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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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
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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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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard