Sown Into Time

“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, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

Good Lives

Roan Mountain

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

Annie Dillard, ‘The Writing Life’

Build Your Wings

Hummingbird at Biltmore Estate

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair.
We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business,
because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense.
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time
and build your wings on the way down.”

Annie Dillard, b. 1945
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

Catching Days

Mountain Saxifrage, Beacon Heights, Blue Ridge Parkway

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim.
It is a net for catching days.
It is a scaffolding on which a worker can
stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

Spend It

Blue Hole, Elizabethton

“Spend the afternoon.
You can’t take it with you.”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

Slow Learning

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

Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

Sown Into Time

“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, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

The Idea of a Thing

Shady Valley, TN

“The idea of a thing which a man framed for himself
was always more real to him than the actual thing itself.”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize winning American author

 

Created Sojourners

View of Limestone Cove and Stone Mountain from Horseback Ridge

“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. And we need reminding of what time can do, must do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God’s blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone.”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
Pulitzer Prize-winning American author

 

Asleep at the Switch

Tulip tree bloom

“We are most deeply asleep at the switch
when we fancy we control any switches at all.”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author

 

No Freak Accidents

Biltmore Walled Garden

“Who are we to demand explanations of God?
(And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?)
We forget ourselves; we forget where we are.
There is no such thing as a freak accident.
‘God is at home,’ says Meister Eckhart, ‘we are in the far country.’”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize-winning American author

 

Who shall stand in his holy place?

Bass Lake, Blowing Rock, NC

“A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy.
I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling.
Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken;
the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make
themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their
flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone?

Ladies and gentleman! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing
series of clouds. The air is bouyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses.
The earth stuck through it is noisome, lighted, and salt. Who shall stand in his holy place?

‘Whom shall I send,’ heard the first Isaiah, ‘and who will go for us?’
And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there —
and there was no one else — burst out, ‘Here I am; send me.’”

Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author