Annie Dillard Quotes About Atheism

Quotes about: Atheism

• An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Religion, Atheism

  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ch. 7 (1974)

• If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

  Annie Dillard

  Atheist, Believe, Common Sense

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.146, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

  Annie Dillard

  Prayer, Children, Thinking

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.126, Canongate Books

• Then why did you tell me?

  Annie Dillard

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

• It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

  Annie Dillard

  Birthday, Self, Ironic

  1974 Of self-consciousness. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ch.6.

• I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

  Annie Dillard

  Crush, Growth, Atheism

  1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ch.10.

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