Quote

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.

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
Return
Someday
Velvet
Helmets
Issues
Wearing
Signals
Lash
Sleep
Madness
Ladies
Flare
Church
Draw
Offense
Straw
May
Wake
Crash
Lashes
Preservers
Take
Issue
Sleeping
Straws
Pews
Never
Draws
Hats
Helmet
Ushers
Life
Wear
Waking
Signal
Flares

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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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.
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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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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
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I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
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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.
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Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
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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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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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Your feelings are none of your business.
Annie Dillard
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if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
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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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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
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The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard