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Holy the Firm

4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 · rating details · 1,861 ratings · 186 reviews

In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in...more

Paperback, 80 pages

Published December 30th 1998 by Harper Perennial (first published 1977)

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Mar 19, 2013 Steve aka Sckenda rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Poetic and Mystical Seekers

Recommended to Steve aka Sckenda by: Jennifer

Shelves: religion, mystic, nature, essays, pulitzer-prize-author

“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord and who will stand in this holy place?” Psalm 24:3

Those interested in mystical spirituality might like this poetic essay on the mystery of suffering. Annie Dillard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” writes from a Christian perspective; however, this challenging book is not pop-inspiration. Dillard, a convert to Catholicism, uses highly poetic language to pose a question that writers have asked (but never satisfactorily answere...more

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Nov 28, 2007 Nathan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who like nature and nature-y prose

Shelves: essays, books-love-jesus

I read this in one sitting (on an airplane, no less) because it's short. I liked it, on the whole, but I think Annie Dillard is growing off me. Is that how to say that? I used to really dig her, and I still think she's got an interesting take on God (as in: violent and immense; in uncomfortable and dangerous proximity.) But the writing strikes me as awfully precious, along the lines of "being this deep is so hard for me / being this deep is so wonderful of me. Look at how I use language!" Okay,...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Three days in the life of Annie Dillard.

Day One, November 18, "Newborn and Salted." She wakes up in a god ("every day is a god"), alone in her small dwelling in Puget Sound, Washington State, nature all around her. She has a cat named Small and a spider in her bathroom. She reads often. She writes what she sees: the moths dying into her burning candles, her cat, the spider in her bathroom and its kills, the land, the trees, the mountains, islands and the sea. She muses about time ("eternity's pa...more Three days in the life of Annie Dillard.

Day One, November 18, "Newborn and Salted." She wakes up in a god ("every day is a god"), alone in her small dwelling in Puget Sound, Washington State, nature all around her. She has a cat named Small and a spider in her bathroom. She reads often. She writes what she sees: the moths dying into her burning candles, her cat, the spider in her bathroom and its kills, the land, the trees, the mountains, islands and the sea. She muses about time ("eternity's pale interlinear, as islands are the sea's. We have less time than we knew and that time bouyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."). November 18 is a day, so it is a god, a god-child, newly-born and, like what the Armenians and the Levites of old did to their babies, salted. This god is a boy, "pagan and fernfoot," whose power is enthusiasm and whose innocence is mystery.

Day Two, November 19, "God's Tooth." A small plane falls to the earth, hits the ground, fuel explodes. Julie Norwich, seven years old, a neighbor's child, she who likes to play with Small and is learning to whistle, gets her face burnt off by the ignited plane fuel. With such horrifying third-degree burns, maybe she'll die. Or live dead to the world, never learning how to whistle, or kiss, and be kissed by a man who loves her, for her lips are gone. Faith wobbles. What kind of god is this day, asks Dillard. Maybe days are not really gods at all. "There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy." A bewildered cry like Job's--

"The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."

That day Dillard espies a new island. She names it Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God's Tooth.

Day Three, Friday, November 20, "Holy the Firm." Here is a thought, while reading about Esoteric Christianity. It is said that there is a substance--in the "spiritual scale"--lower than all the metals, minerals and earths known to anyone. Its name is Holy the Firm. It is in touch with the Absolute at base, and in touch with everything else upwards ascending to the Absolute. An unbroken circle of reality, eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, God having a stake guaranteed in all the world. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, fate uncertain, salted with fire. Dillard holds on to these ideas, by the single handful, of the Absolute, in touch with Holy the Firm, at its base, the latter in touch with everything, even those which appears senseless, seeing all the possibilities for the young child Julie Norwich: dead, alive and consecrated to God, or living a fairly normal life like everyone else.(less)

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Feb 16, 2011 Longfellow rated it 3 of 5 stars

Just yesterday someone told me that Annie Dillard has said this is one of her least favorite books. Regardless, her self-standards are exceptionally high, and amongst our choices, her "worst" works must still be some of the most profound in thought and most unique in their creativeness.

I haven't read much Dillard, but each time I do, I am astounded by her attention to detail and by her ability to create shockingly clear images with words. Indeed, her gift for using words is beyond explanation....more Just yesterday someone told me that Annie Dillard has said this is one of her least favorite books. Regardless, her self-standards are exceptionally high, and amongst our choices, her "worst" works must still be some of the most profound in thought and most unique in their creativeness.

I haven't read much Dillard, but each time I do, I am astounded by her attention to detail and by her ability to create shockingly clear images with words. Indeed, her gift for using words is beyond explanation. One must experience her writing to see that, truly, using words in unique combination allows her to express ideas in a way no one else ever has. It is almost as if she understands the world in another language and yet is able to translate this other understanding into English for those of us less gifted in vision.

Holy the Firm might blow out of your window and fly away on a windy day; it's a skinny little 76 pages, weighted with the contemplation of a much larger work. Dillard questions the injustices and sufferings of life without feeling obligated to express the skeptic's doubt in the power and goodness of God. I think she would say this is not our realm. Rather, we must realize our own responsibility, to observe, to blunder, to turn our heads and blink our eyes in constant awe. Humility and gratitude are mixed with honest but unaffected sorrow. One suspects that laughter may be both Dillard's way of expressing joy as well as a substitute for her tears. She does seem to be, as Van Morrison would say, one who has "let go into the mystery."

Some favorite quotes:

(To a little two year old boy) "Hullo, short and relatively new. Welcome again to the land of the living, to time, this hill of beans."

"I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed."

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."

"There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows."

"Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and replenishing series of clouds."(less)

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Jan 22, 2009 Dana rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Auzelle

Shelves: nonfiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 20, 2012 Kendra rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, faith-christianity, mfa-recommendations, nonfiction

Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm is a classic. By that, I mean a lot of things. This slender volume--only seventy-six pages!--includes her famous moth essay, which I was required to read in my second year of college, and which I required my students to read in their first. It's a good essay. Apart from being an instrument of learning (or torture, depending on the student you're talking to), Holy the Firmis classic for another reason: it deals with the classic (or universal) question of suffering....more Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm is a classic. By that, I mean a lot of things. This slender volume--only seventy-six pages!--includes her famous moth essay, which I was required to read in my second year of college, and which I required my students to read in their first. It's a good essay. Apart from being an instrument of learning (or torture, depending on the student you're talking to), Holy the Firm is classic for another reason: it deals with the classic (or universal) question of suffering. Dillard spent over a year crafting these seventy-six pages, even though the observations they record took place over only three days.

Some scholars suspected Dillard of being high while writing this book, and I can well see why: the language is so elevated, the tone so enthusiastic, and the dialectic between head and heart so amplified, that she seems to have spun out of this earth's orbit entirely. She accomplishes the nonfiction writer's primary goal, and makes the familiar unfamiliar. I, for one, do not suspect her of imbibing hallucinogenics. What of those fourteen months spent drafting so few pages? I suspect Dillard was obsessing over her craft, and tinkering with verbs. I cannot escape them; they enfold me, beat me round the head. I am continually surprised when I re-read a passage and find Dillard using ordinary words and ordinary structures; her arrangements are precise and powerful, carefully calculated for maximum effect. She makes me giddy with words.

Dillard is, after all, a poet.

I must force myself to look at this book through the lens of a student, too, and of someone who will be expected to connect the dots between Holy the Firm and the subject of the interior journey. Sometimes Dillard herself asks the necessary questions. Questions of existence ("Why are there all these apples in the world, and why so wet and transparent?" [65]), of reality ("But how do we know--how could we know--that the real is there?" [48]), of worthiness ("Who are we to demand explanations of God?" [62], and "Who am I to buy the communion wine?" [63]), and of God's identity and how we figure in ("Has he no power?" [43], and "The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose?" [47]). Unlike Boethius, who I spent the other half of my day reading, Dillard doesn't make Philosophy some exterior person and begin a lengthy dialogue. She keeps Philosophy on a tight leash, interrogates herself, and drowns her reader in impressions. The questions crystallize into story, and Dillard's energetic self seizes upon the exterior world as a metaphor for her inner life. A pipe is not a pipe, a cat is not a cat, and pain is transformation's other face.

Dillard has a terribly modest view of the artist (and therefore, the writer--and therefore, herself): she writes, "What can any artist set on fire but his world? ... His face is flame like a seraph's, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned" (72). So you see, she is unafraid to state what all artists think but rarely feel free to broadcast: we are just so awesome, aren't we? I'm afraid I find this kind of self-gratifying back-patting to be rather a boost to my ailing ego--but I can't stand by it, if only because I've run out of matches and my kindling is damp. I cannot think of myself as a lynchpin for global change--but hey, it's kind of a nice thought, and well in keeping with Dillard's go-gettum attitude. This world does not go quietly into the good night of her senses; it leaves its impressions with all of the rough and tumble fierceness of a tomcat's duel, and all of the sharp clear pain that loss and love can muster.(less)

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Jul 25, 2011 Nathan added it

Poetry slips between folds of time and space. It traverses places that aren’t places. Having breathed transcendent air, upon its return poetry exhales over us like dandelion seeds on a gusty afternoon.

Dillard’s opening piece breathes these seeds. I read two pages before stopping, starting again, and re-reading the entire section (all 30 pages) aloud. Each word is sewn seamlessly to the one after. It is surely some of the most stunning writing I’ve read.

“Into this world falls a plane,” opens sect...more

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Dec 08, 2010 J. Alfred rated it 4 of 5 stars

Confusing as you can believe, heartbreaking, and absolutely gorgeous. This book deals more honestly with the problem of God and pain than anything else I've ever read except Job.
The majority of the book is about a young girl whose face is badly burnt in a freak accident. From what I understand, it is based on a real event, but Dillard names her child Julie Norwich; her mother's name is Anne. Thus the child is Julie of Anne Norwich. This is interesting in that there was a fourteenth century myst...more

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May 03, 2007 peter rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'm happy reading Annie Dillard just for the words most of the time, but this book asks difficult questions about pain and about the presence of God in the world. It's probably her least focused book (other than Pilgrim At Tinker Creek), not surprising since it's only her second, but it got down inside me somehow and I haven't been the same since.

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Feb 19, 2010 Rimas rated it 4 of 5 stars

In brief, this book is one case where I'd urge readers of this review to go find more interesting reviews of it to read, I imagine this one has spawned passionate comments from thousands of readers and writers. The beginning two sentences read like a revelation:

"Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split."

I w...more

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Nov 24, 2008 Ellen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: essays

This book felt to me like three scraps that had been cut from the Pilgrim manuscript and published separately. I love Dillard's writing in general but these felt even less cohesive to me than usual. Like her other work, however, I kept reading for those lines and paragraphs that punch you in the gut and make you cry. "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...more

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May 20, 2013 Tara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Inspired reading for my upcoming trip to the Oregon coast. Written during Dillard's stay on an island in Puget Sound, this short collection covers familiar territory: faith, nature, mystery. But also anger, injustice, and our collective obsession with The West.

"When I first came here I faced east and watched the mountains...since they are, incredibly, east, I must be no place at all. But the sun rose over the snowfields and woke me where I lay, and I rose and cast a shadow over someplace, and th...more

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May 04, 2012 Gretchen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Trying to articulate a sacramental experience or, perhaps more accurately, the experience of the holy which is the raison d'etre for a sacrament, is impossible. I can only grope. This book makes of the minute details and great expanses of Creation the outward and visible sign of the author's inward and spiritual journey toward understanding the cruelties of life that cannot be understood. I can't say how Annie Dillard does it without being too melodramatic in places or too silly in others, but s...more

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Jan 21, 2010 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this much too fast and will read it again soon.

I feel like Dillard's work, and this book in particular, is to writing what impressionism is to painting. I don't always get it, but I love it. I wish I could write like her.

She lost me at points, but blew me away at others. Not a long enough book to get bogged down in either. Must be I am trying to sell my favorite authors tonight, but I feel like this one would be a decent taste of Dillard for those who can't quite get into her otherwise: s...more

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Nov 06, 2010 Megan rated it 2 of 5 stars

i was captivated by the first page of this book, which opens "Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk ... This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant. It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves..."

but the book mostly continues like this, fizzing up and splintering down and not telling me much i could sink my teeth into. dilla...more

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Apr 14, 2011 Tammy V rated it 5 of 5 stars

Beautiful, evocative writing - just makes you feel *good*! "This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant. It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves. This is the one air, bitten by grackles; time is alone and in and out of mind. The god of today is a boy, pagan and fernfoot. His power is enthusiasm; his innocence is mystery. He sockets into everything that is, and that right holy. Loud as music, filling the grasses and the skies, his day spreads rising at home...more

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Jun 17, 2011 Jessie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: for-teaching, nonfiction, philosophy, spirit

I read this little zinger for the umpteenth time because I've assigned it for a "Spiritual Autobiography" seminar -- *gulp* So bizarre, so jam-packed with muscular metaphors -- it about blows my head apart every time I read it. Sure she's mannered in her prose and waaaay over the top, but I can't help but fall in love with how she tears through any viscous veil of humdrumness that forms over lived life.
If anyone has ideas for how to teach it, feel free to share them with me! That image of the m...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Hayley Gregory rated it 5 of 5 stars

I started reading this book,begrudgingly, for a class entitled "Literature and Religion" and it turned out to be an amazing course as well as an amazing book. It has a strange, dreamy, writing style, jumping from profound observations and theories to very straight-forward and familiar descriptions of average, contemporary life. Through this, it becomes relatable in regard to both the life we live and present as well as the life led through thought and theory, in the mind, examining it's own life...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Cj rated it 4 of 5 stars

Very poetic in its presentation, bringing images to the mind as you pick the words up off the page. A fine piece of literature, though occasionally making me feel as if I was drowning in Dillard's perspective rather than swimming through it. The words made me feel as if I were being thrown onto rocks by the waves instead of a nice sandy beach. A harsh contrast to my more literal view of the world, this piece still provided a pleasant contrast for the majority of the work. Still her perspective w...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, memoir, nature, religion, philosophy, essays, spirituality

This slim volume electrified and astounded me with its depth and poetry. Dillard writes of her time spent in a one-room shack on an island in Puget Sound in northeast Washington with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person". With marvelous metaphors and surprising turns of phrase, this prose poem explores the eternal in the particular and vice versa, reaching for a solution for the paradoxes evident in the most common perspectives of our place in the universe. The view of God a...more

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May 29, 2011 Mickey rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Annie Dillard at her mesmerizing, rambling, inscrutable best. The theme of this book (and from what I've heard, she's claimed only one reviewer from Harvard has managed to figure it out) is less concrete than Pilgrim or An American Childhood, so it might be a frustrating read for those of us that require some...um...logical point to a book. (Personally, I'm not one of them. I'll happily float along, immersed in her amazing words and phrases...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Kate rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction-tbr, spirituality, read-in-2012

"In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound, in a wooden room furnished with 'one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person.' For the next two years she asked herselrf questions about time, reality, sacrifice, death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a sever-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she called 'the hard thing...more

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May 06, 2008 Nathaniel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Annie Dillard writes boldly and brings the same devoted attention to a dusty beetle carcass or a weather pattern that she brings to the mutilation of a child, to human relations and to god. She is earnest in a rare, humble and humorous fashion, never flippant or cheap and occasionally riveting and wise.

Because of the passages that she gets right, I don't feel like ripping apart the weaker places in this book where she seems to fall short, channeling unexceptional moments of Walt Whitman or Hart...more Annie Dillard writes boldly and brings the same devoted attention to a dusty beetle carcass or a weather pattern that she brings to the mutilation of a child, to human relations and to god. She is earnest in a rare, humble and humorous fashion, never flippant or cheap and occasionally riveting and wise.

Because of the passages that she gets right, I don't feel like ripping apart the weaker places in this book where she seems to fall short, channeling unexceptional moments of Walt Whitman or Hart Crane or the passages where, for one reason or another, I don't wrestle along beside her with whatever tragedy or injustice she spends pages piling objects and experiences around.

I have patience for her because she has at least three distinct ways of getting it right:

Her focus on small things generally seems warranted, even when she doesn't tax her subjects with becoming metaphors that help her assemble spiritual thoughts. To me, such passages can be a useful reminder to slow down and pay attention; to get outside of myself. And they are written nicely, reminding me of Francis Ponge, "There is a spider, too, in the bathroom, with whom I keep a sort of company. Her little outfit always reminds me of a certain moth I helped to kill. The spider herself is of uncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of a web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed. The web itself is in a corner behind the toilet, connecting the tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corpses that she has tossed to the floor."

When she admits other humans into her narrative, she treats them with tender care and assembles, quite deliberately, the circumstances that make them sensible, "She saw me watching her and we exchanged a look, a very conscious and self-conscious look--because we look a bit alike and we both knew it; because she was still short and I grown; because I was stuck kneeling before the cider pail, looking at her sidewise over my shoulder; because she was carrying the cat so olddly, so that she had to walk with her long legs parted; because it was my cat, and she'd dressed it, and it looked like a nun; and because she knew I'd been watching her, and how fondly, all along."

And she inevitably (at least in her works that are not novels, in which she can comfortably announce, "Nothing is going to happen in this book") gets to talking about god or about divinity or immanence or transcendence, or whatever she is comfortable calling it. She forages through the mystic tradition of various religions unearthing salient little quotation gems (though mostly from Judeo-Christian sources) and unflinchingly adds her own prerogative, which is reliably unorthodox in a fashion that is both critical and accepting. She is also more than comfortable launching small attacks against god and theology: "Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home?"

I can imagine her utterances about God proving abrasive to some readers and a real cynic might associate some of her musings with a thinly elevated chicken soup for the soul type of pocket philosophy; but I don't think that Dillard is trying to write manuals or aphorisms and I like that she is unashamed to mix her personal doubts and struggles into the thoughts and observations she is good enough to share.

This book is scarcely fifty pages long and it is not nearly as good as "Teaching a Stone to Talk." It is a very low four stars.(less)

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Jun 27, 2008 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction-narrative

So, I was shelf-reading in the stacks today at work when I came upon this book. Someone had recently recommended Annie Dillard to me, and so I took this as a sure sign that I should read the book. These things, after all, don't just happen as coincidences. Books come to you, and you have to agree to read them.

Anyway, this book is less than 80 pages, but it says more than most 300-page books I've read. In fact, I probably need to read it a couple of more times. This is deeply poetic prose that ge...more

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Jan 06, 2008 Elise rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I first read this book my heart had been deeply stirred by a compelling desire to experience God in his wild, untamed attributes, knowing that the experience would be terrifying and purifying. It was then that my deep desire was birthed to spend at least one year in the Pacific Northwest where I would experience the gray, windy, blustery, wet winter that only the Pacific Northwest knows. I knew it would be at once terrible and transformationally beautiful. Well, I got my wish when I moved u...more

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May 03, 2009 A. Gamble rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy-and-religion

"It's the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools--that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feel likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. The joke part is that we forget it. Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it's Pythagoras. We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh."

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Nov 26, 2012 Jonathan Hiskes rated it 4 of 5 stars

A deceptively slim meditation on time, suffering, gods, and the mystery-laden Puget Sound. I'd love to read it with a discussion group or a philosopher friend. "There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were."

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Mar 12, 2008 Rachel Bash rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this book in a literary theory class as a sophomore in college, and it shook the very foundations of my thought. I know this sounds (and is) vague, but this is a book about EVERYTHING, written with poetic economy, concrete images, and, I imagine, some kind of grace. Dillard reflects on what it means to be an artist (it's being a nun, being a moth on fire, being a little girl burned, being a tired, burnt out writer), and in the process takes on time, mortality, and fury at the spitefulness...more

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Apr 20, 2011 megan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Beautiful/outrageous book that gives the reader the opportunity to wrestle with the infinite.

"I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders."

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Dec 21, 2012 Courtney rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had to read it a second time, right after reading it. It was deep, heavy, and beautiful--extremely poetic. I didn't always agree with the interpretations of God, but I could understand where they were coming from, and I think we have all hurt so fully at one point or another that we get a little cynical. I am still trying to figure out exactly what she is saying, so I am positive I will pick it up a third time.

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Quotes from Holy the Firm

“We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.” — 47 people liked it

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.” — 21 people liked it

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7695.Holy_the_Firm?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348348352l/7695.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7695.Holy_the_Firm?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard[/url]

Holy the Firm

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