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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e273dc2 | At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244] | Annie Dillard | ||
| e737cb1 | I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267). | universe wonder page | Annie Dillard | |
| 5d1030a | A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life--the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives--as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the a.. | history childhood memory | Annie Dillard | |
| 247f85c | The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." --Annie Dillard" | Austin Kleon | ||
| 9196720 | 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....No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 0843336 | That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very comprising terms th.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| cccfd43 | This light-shouldered boy could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged...Only the strenth in our fingertips kept us alive. If they weakened or slipped, his fingertips or mine, we'd fall spinning backward across the length of the room and out through the glass French doors to the snowy terrace, and if we were any good we'd make sure we fell on the downbeat, snow or no snow. | Annie Dillard | ||
| aee63d2 | As a child I read hoping to learn everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father's grasp of information and reasoning with my mother's will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us . . . and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And .. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 46eddf0 | If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it. | Annie Dillard | ||
| de93f3e | Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you. | women | Annie Dillard | |
| 9b573e9 | The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that.. | fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation | Annie Dillard | |
| 7879b53 | I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can't think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directi.. | fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching trees growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation | Annie Dillard | |
| 349ac93 | Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities -- looking over my own shoulder, as it were -- the tree vanishes, upr.. | Annie Dillard | ||
| f1f3c26 | In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, eit.. | fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation | Annie Dillard | |
| a74238d | One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 50146e0 | Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 10fd338 | I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. | religion ideas memoir memory | Annie Dillard | |
| 6ca2be2 | The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. | writing-life spirituality | Annie Dillard | |
| e092273 | The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity. | writing-life sensitivity discipline | Annie Dillard | |
| c5be70c | Unification is the very soul of dharma. We see it in every life we've studied during this entire project. Thoreau streamlined his life in order to free his inner mystic. Frost became a farmer who farmed poetry. Goodall organized her life around her chimps. The degree of unification that you accomplish is the degree to which you're doing your dharma. "How we spend our days," says author Annie Dillard, "is, of course, how we spend our lives.".. | Stephen Cope | ||
| 0f713ad | So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now. | philosophy | Annie Dillard | |
| 55a6c17 | One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you." Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek--and in many other places--has it, "I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend." | Pico Iyer | ||
| cfa6097 | I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. | Annie Dillard | ||
| 09665e5 | All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way. | Amy Tan | ||
| 3dc92a5 | If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home. Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband's Stanley Powerlock tape measure, and the half-undressed self, squatting. | Mary Roach | ||
| d5f1e47 | No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality. | space | Mary Roach | |
| e1abc02 | Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, "Greetings from the Dork Club." | Mary Roach | ||
| 0ca9aff | Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn't come too soon, | Mary Roach | ||
| 3544438 | to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects"--a heading that, w.. | Mary Roach | ||
| a46bd2e | The researchers concluded that during intercourse in the missionary position, the penis "has the shape of a boomerang." | Mary Roach | ||
| 2cfe30f | Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs. Good luck to Deanna Pucciarelli, the woman who seeks to introduce mainstream America to the culinary joys of pig balls. "I am indeed working on a project on pork testicles," said Pucciarelli, director of the Hospitality and Food Management Program at--fill my heart with joy!--Ball State University." | Mary Roach | ||
| ec2ca71 | Here's the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab .. | Mary Roach | ||
| 0cab3b2 | He simply believed that lame sex destroyed more marriages than did anything else, and that "considering the inveterate marriage habit of the race," something ought to be done." | Mary Roach | ||
| 208eacb | It's no coincidence that the man who contributed the most to the study of human anatomy, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius, was an avid proponent of do-it-yourself, get-your-fussy-Renaissance-shirt-dirty anatomical dissection. | Mary Roach | ||
| ae0f90f | It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book. | Mary Roach | ||
| bb8b2af | Medical journals from 1905 to 1915 are rife with articles on "vibratory massage" and the many things it cures. Weakened hearts and floating kidneys. Hysterical cramp of the esophagus and catarrh of the inner ear. Deafness, cancer, bad eyesight. And lots and lots of prostate problems. A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of "a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrato.. | Mary Roach | ||
| f798c76 | He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-.. | Mary Roach | ||
| d7a76ca | Few sciences are as rooted in shame, infamy, and bad PR as human anatomy. The troubles began in Alexandrian Egypt, circa 300 B.C. King Ptolemy I was the first leader to deem it a-okay for medical types to cut open the dead for the purpose of figuring out how bodies work. | Mary Roach | ||
| e16f853 | Given the complexity of the chore, "escapees," as free-floating fecal material is known in astronautical circles, plagued the crews. Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring Mission Commander Thomas Stafford, Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan, and Command Module Pilot John Young, orbiting the moon 200,000-plus miles from the nearest bathroom. CERNAN:...You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of thi.. | Mary Roach | ||
| 1ff8788 | Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it's impossible to know how to react. | Mary Roach | ||
| 20da8ee | The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal--conception, the passing on of one's genes--and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background. | Mary Roach | ||
| aa43c82 | I find the dead easier to be around than the dying. They are not in pain, not afraid of death. There are no awkward silences and conversations that dance around the obvious. They aren't scary...Cadavers, once you get used to them--and you do that quite fast--are surprisingly easy to be around. | Mary Roach | ||
| e5e7f9b | We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her. | Mary Roach | ||
| d903938 | They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn't support that view. If you look at a two-year mission to Mars, it's kind of a scary prospect. | Mary Roach |