Quotes About Creation

We shape clay into a pot, but it is emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. -TAO TE CHING

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

In the opening pages of Genesis, we see that our Trinitarian God made everything "good." The only thing that is not called "good" is that our first father, Adam, was alone. He had creation below him, and God above him, but no one alongside of him to walk as an equal.

You were created by God, are on the earth to image and glorify God, and when you die, if you are in Christ, you will be with God forever, imaging and glorifying him perfectly in a sinless state.

And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo.

People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist.

And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

The greatest blizzards start with the finest snow.

They move, don't they? Who do you think sets things to moving? Nothing that moves lacks a soul.

Circuit boards have foundations made of paper;

I guess I can picture things once they're done - I just can't picture actually doing them.

Being human, we struggle constantly to stay with the miracle of what is and not to fall constantly into the black hole of what is not. This is an ancient challenge. As the Sufi poet Ghalib said centuries ago, "Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise; hearing what is not can drive you mad.

As does a magician, a writer creates a world, immerses the reader in it, & makes the reader believe it's reality.

The easiest way to a "lifestyle" is a government job. The following year, another survey (from Newsweek) found that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States were in the Washington commuter belt.9 What matters in the America of the twenty-first century is proximity not to industry or to wealth creation but to government.

Structure is an art. In some ways, it's the only art.

Death is the Mother of Beauty

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

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

If landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go.

If I dangled my hand from the deck of the Ra into the sea, could a gooseneck barnacle fasten there? If I gathered a cup of ocean water, would I be holding a score of dying and dead barnacle larvae? Should I throw them a chip? What kind of a world is this, anyway? Why not make fewer barnacle larvae and give them a decent chance? Are we dealing in life, or in death?

original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph's role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work's ends.

The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee's Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.