Annie Dillard - God Quotes

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I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Eskimo earnestly, did you tell me?

Annie Dillard
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
Of all God's works, little girls were the superior article: broadest in sympathy, deepest in wisdom, and purest in impulse.

Annie Dillard
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.

Annie Dillard
I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.

Annie Dillard
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

Annie Dillard
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.

Annie Dillard
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. 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 some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Annie Dillard
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

Annie Dillard
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder.... It was as if an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth's face.

Annie Dillard
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
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

Annie Dillard