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e72601a What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not .. seeing reality spirituality landscape Annie Dillard
36ea3b6 The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives. universe Annie Dillard
7a1727a Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden. Annie Dillard
5541181 The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. god soul Annie Dillard
b47b305 I center down - I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself. ... Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Annie Dillard
fbe83da 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 Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?" Annie Dillard
3f8798d What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think--the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as y.. gratitude joy wonder knowledge memoir childhood Annie Dillard
e5fdfe9 Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light...unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous...we don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combination.. spirituality landscape mystery mysticism Annie Dillard
ee34b19 Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights are just suggested; they're there....when I think of walking across a continent I think of all the neighborhood hills, the tiny grades up which children drag their sleds. It is all so sculptured, three-dimensional, casting a shad.. nature spirituality landscape globe Annie Dillard
d567b33 The creatures I seek do not want to be seen. nature scientist natural-world see look find sight searching Annie Dillard
38be4ad If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't? Annie Dillard
517af2e I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. Annie Dillard
08ba703 The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. Annie Dillard
80abc23 There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. Annie Dillard
b05266d When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination. Annie Dillard
f7fd070 Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live. silence Annie Dillard
29403d4 Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again. reading Annie Dillard
1ac0174 In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body." writing work craft trade Annie Dillard
52c3984 The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had.. Annie Dillard
68f0e65 We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. nature life watching Annie Dillard
b1bfa49 You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that .. Annie Dillard
7f175f9 Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. Annie Dillard
bcfc51b The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control. Annie Dillard
bd49a23 I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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 Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me? Annie Dillard
fb3186d So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. reading writing readers-and-writers writing-craft writing-process Annie Dillard
d1e74ac I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is "it"... in the top inch of soil, biologists found "an average of 1,356 living creatures in each square foot... I might as well include these creatures in this moment, as best as I can. My ignoring.. seeing science life hasidic-judaism Annie Dillard
c2210ed As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible -- or at least visible, at least discussible -- those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science's tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us.. Annie Dillard
dcc774f Children...wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride,; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel .. Annie Dillard
557a834 You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants' murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days "affords" us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, "the world in which you live, just as it is, and not.. spirituality Annie Dillard
dce7b59 A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. Annie Dillard
167b5b1 Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all. Annie Dillard
a3f5298 It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. Annie Dillard
25f63f9 The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they .. universe beauty spirituality Annie Dillard
8655986 Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she an.. imagination benign-neglect parenting curiosity childhood Annie Dillard
e73b5a2 Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. Annie Dillard
274e321 At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, 'Come down to the water.' It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi do.. nature life wisdom landscape Annie Dillard
9fcbc22 I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out. world plays Annie Dillard
4269c03 Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block. outdoors thoughtful Annie Dillard
1f80fb3 I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our origina.. landscape Annie Dillard
f3312f7 The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return fr.. seeing prayer nature spirituality Annie Dillard
db6b6d5 We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole land.. Annie Dillard
1e3fbed What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world. Annie Dillard
2e0be52 There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick. silence life matter land Annie Dillard
82f1242 He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know. Annie Dillard
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