Quote #7

So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet - inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?

More from Annie Dillard

  1. It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to ju…
  2. The surest sign of age is loneliness.
  3. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
  4. Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
  5. Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
  6. On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea…
  7. Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to Hell?'
  8. As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

All Annie Dillard quotes