Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

—Annie Dillard

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About Annie Dillard

Portrait of Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (née Doak; born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won...

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There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

—Annie Dillard

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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. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

—Annie Dillard

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The dying must often feel this way — steaming along just fine, while on ahead someone has torn up the rails.

—Annie Dillard

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I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else — but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence.

—Annie Dillard

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In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? . . . If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?

—Annie Dillard

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Even when we were standing in church and I was getting ready to take my vow I can remember wishing that you were standing there instead of him.

—Nicholas Sparks in The Best of Me

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The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.

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It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole race of [humankind] and the world with [it] . . . . I make monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and when I speak it is to deny that my faith and my church can ever be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction. But it is true, nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial injustices, believe in self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also, and perhaps against these most of all.

—Thomas Merton

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There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. . . . I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock.

—James Baldwin

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My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

—Aldous Huxley

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