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

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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
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The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
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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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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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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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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
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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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A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
Annie Dillard