Quotes from Annie Dillard

No one ever said it would be easy

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

The moth's enormous wings are velveted in a rich, warm, brown, and edged in bands of blue and pink delicate as a watercolour wash. A startling 'eyespot,' immense, and deep blue melding to an almost translucent yellow, luxuriates in the centre of each hind wing. The effect is one of a masculine splendour foreign to the butterflies, a fragility unfurled to strength

1. Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself" (202).

But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn't be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important.

Each thing in the world is translucent.

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life.

There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without.

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...No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

Lou knew Deary slept in the dunes somewhere. She claimed to like the way starlight smelled on sand. Once Cornelius asked her how the smell of starlight on sand differed from the smell of moonlight. —More peppery.

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path...there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.

I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully crue

No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

Somewhere, and I can't find where, 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?

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do.

Martin Buber tells this tale: "Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. 'Yes,' said Rabbi Elimelekh, 'in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don't see these things any more.

Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.