A Quote by Annie Dillard

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? — © Annie Dillard
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Life is a mystery - mystery of beauty, bliss and divinity. Meditation is the art of unfolding that mystery.
Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'.
The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.
Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!
That's the essence of our faith. It's living with hope in the face of mystery. We live a life of faith completely full of hope, staring mystery right in the face. You can't have one without the other. Your faith won't survive without hope, and hope won't survive without the realization that there are mysteries that will not be answered. If you can embrace both, you can have a vibrant faith.
If death disappears there will be no mystery in life. That's why a dead thing has no mystery in it, a corpse has no mystery in it, because it cannot die anymore. You think it has no mystery because life has disappeared? No, it has no mystery because now it cannot die anymore. Death has disappeared, and with death automatically life disappears. Life is only one of the ways of death's expression.
The deepest mystery of Twitter is why celebrities and elected officials take part. After all, we all know they can't write their own lines.
Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
We don't like mystery. You like mystery, 'cause it's not a mystery to you; you know when you're gonna get laid.
I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'
Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled.
If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.
No one's life should be rooted in fear. We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.
To find something beautiful is to hope that your life will be better if that is a part of it. Unfortunately, the promise of a better life that beauty makes and the hope that it will be fulfilled are not always realized: beauty, like friendship, is also double-edged.
If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?" "Because they are beautiful monsters..., And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.
The beauty of having nothing to lose, is you learn the beauty of having everything to gain. This is where hope lives. Hope can’t be taken. Hope can’t be lost. Hope can’t be broken. When we are boiled down to what we are as people. We are not love, because we hope to love, we are not money or who we hold, because we hope to have and to hold. We are not religion or God, because we enter into belief in the hope we get something back for ourselves. We are not a soul. We are hope.
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