Providence Quotes

“[E]ducation is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. This is particularly true of elementary and secondary education, of course…. I began to remember what it had been like: the tremendous excitement of the first couple of years, when kids imagine that great secrets are going to be unfolding before them, then the disappointment that gradually sets in when you begin to realize the truth: There’s plenty of learning to do, but it’s not the learning you wanted. It’s learning to keep your mouth shut, learning how to avoid attracting the teacher’s attention when you don’t want it, learning not to ask questions, learning how to pretend to understand, learning how to tell teachers what they want to hear, learning to keep your own ideas and opinions to yourself, learning how to look as if you’re paying attention, learning how to endure the endless boredom.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“Don’t wait. Writers are the only artists I know of who expect to get somewhere by waiting. Everyone knows you have to dance to be a dancer, you have to sing to be a singer, you have to act to be an actor, but far too many people seem to believe that you. don’t have to write to be a writer. So, instead of writing, they wait. Isaac Asimov said it beautifully in just six words: “It’s the writing that teaches you.” Writing is what teaches you. Writing is what leads to “inspiration.” Writing is what generates ideas. Nothing else-and nothing less. Don’t meditate, don’t do yoga, don’t do drugs. Just write.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it’s never examined or even noticed by anyone. It’s like the sound of blood rushing through your veins—you hear it so constantly that you don’t hear it at all.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it’s their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“The current controversy over God’s sex doesn’t strike anyone as being the least bit primitive. If God is going to be like us, then there must be sexual equipment of one kind or the other, even though it presumably doesn’t get much use.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn’t work, they don’t say, “Well, we must have valves, so let’s try two valves.” If a valve doesn’t work, they say, “Well, what would work?” Their rule is, if it doesn’t work, don’t do it more, do something else.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“A battered wife will invest all her feelings of self-worth in her battering husband. She has totally accepted her husband’s valuation of her, and this is why she stays: She hopes to redeem herself in her husband’s eyes—and therefore in her own.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“Only slaves love being powerful. HANS ERICH NOSSACK”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in the order of creation, that man has a value in God’s eyes that is transcendently greater than that of all other creatures, that this world of matter is illusory, transitory, and worthless.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

“To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on.”
― Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest