Lunatic Fringe

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.  Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy.  If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.  In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade.  The whole creation is one lunatic fringe.  If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.  No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek