“Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it's our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.”

American novelist

Lydia Millet is an American novelist. Her 2020 novel A Children's Bible was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has drawn praise for its language and style, with Salon describing it as “flawlessly beautiful” and suggesting that it reaches toward an experience that comes before language itself. The New York Times Book Review named A Children's Bible one of the ten best books of the year.