“We live in all we seek.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time-- or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-- but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China.
To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000.
See? Nothing to it.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“There is no less holiness at this time- as you are reading this- than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree…. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...
Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
“Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from For the Time Being
Annie Dillard
Born place: in Pittsburgh, PA, The United States
Born date April 30, 1945
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“I think about it all the time, about what makes everyone who they are, and if we went back in time and changed anything, whether or not it would make a difference. Would it make us better or worse, or would we just stay exactly the same because we were always destined to end up this way no matter what happened throughout our lives? ~ Evie Snow”
― Carrie Hope Fletcher, quote from On the Other Side
“I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.”
― Ishmael Beah, quote from A Long Way Gone
“Don’t get me started on corporate conspiracies and the communist mind fuck that is public radio.” “Okay.”
― Laekan Zea Kemp, quote from The Girl In Between
“A person cannot grow up through happiness. Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up, transform, and come to a better understanding of life.”
― Leslie T. Chang, quote from Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
“you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.” ―Henny Youngman”
― Jamie Ayres, quote from 18 Things
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