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The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.

Picture of Annie Dillard
Annie DillardTeaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

More Annie Dillard quotes

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It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand a...

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Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess,...

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Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?

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The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were do...

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In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except t...

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It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. ...

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Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins...

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The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at ...

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All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted we...

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I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some inn...

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A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will recor...

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These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always desc...

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The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

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Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in ...