Holy the Firm Quotes

“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.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“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.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose-hips, the apples and thorn. I seem to be on a road, walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. ”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that's burnt out, any muck ready to hand?”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“The higher Christian churches--where, if anywhere, I belong--come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect in any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“The idea of a thing which a man framed for himself was always more real to him than the actual thing itself.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“We have less time than we knew and that time
buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Each thing in the world is translucent.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“We had a wretched singer once, a guest from a Canadian congregation, a hulking blond girl with chopped hair and big shoulders, who wore tinted spectacles and a long lacy dress, and sang, grinning to faltering accompaniment, an entirely secular song about mountains. Nothing could have been more apparent than that God loved this girl...”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“The minister is a Congregationalist, and wears a white shirt. The man knows God. Once, in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world---for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, succor to the oppressed, and God's grace to all---in the middle of this he stopped, and burst out, "Lord, we bring you these same petitions every week." After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Faith would be that God is self-limited utterly by his creation---a contraction of the scope of his will; that he bound himself to time and its hazards and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love. That God's works are as good as we make them.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel's worth of sense into our days.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“It is 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 feet 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.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“God despises everything, apparently. If he abandoned us, slashing creation loose at its base from any roots in the real; and if we in turn abandon everything—all these illusions of time and space and lives—in order to love only the real: then where are we? Thought itself is impossible, for subject can have no guaranteed connection with object, nor any object with God. Knowledge is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an entirely imaginary ice floe, into entirely imaginary seas themselves adrift. Then we reel out love’s long line alone toward a God less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Pole muid sündmusi peale mõtete ja südame raske vaeva, südame aeglase teadasaamise, kus ja keda ta armastab. Kõik muu on tühi jutt, mida võib rääkida mujal.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“He lifts from the water. Water beads on his shoulders. I see the water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises. He stands wet in the water. Each one bead is transparent, and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop: it is all there ever could be, moving at once, past and future, and all the people. I can look into any sphere and see people stream past me, and cool my eyes with colors and the sight of the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed. I do; I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth's contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“I like to tease a bit, if he'll let me, with the owners' son, two, whose name happens to be Chandler, and who himself likes to play in the big bins of nails.

And so, forgetting myself, thank God: Hullo. Hullo, short and relatively new. Welcome again to the land of the living, to time, this hill of beans. Chandler will have, as usual, none of it. He keeps his mysterious counsel.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm