Quotes from Annie Dillard

The Bible's was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream.

The universe has continued to deal in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames.

The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed?

I like to tease a bit, if he'll let me, with the owners' son, two, whose name happens to be Chandler, and who himself likes to play in the big bins of nails. And so, forgetting myself, thank God: Hullo. Hullo, short and relatively new. Welcome again to the land of the living, to time, this hill of beans. Chandler will have, as usual, none of it. He keeps his mysterious counsel.

The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind's sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.

At four Petie took to yelling at the heavenly bodies: —Hey, orbs! Wait for me! or, Orbs…listen to this! A genius, Lou thought; he commanded constellations. Clearly a poet.

Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.

And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. — Annie Dillard, from "Living Like Weasels," Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, New York, 2009, Kindle Edition)

I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair.

They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.

she reads book as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. ?

They acted in only two small events—three, if love counts. Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.

Her courtesy, her compliance, and especially her silence dated from a time otherwise gone.

Our reading was subversive, and we knew it... I was now believing books more than I believed what I saw and heard... What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling... What I sought in books was a world (that)... actually matched the exaltation of the interior life.

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now." —Annie Dillard

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing clean and green.

Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them.

Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou's experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment?

From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt—older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.

Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year, for he did write every day—a good-sized book a year. At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific literary writers who ever lived.

We don't know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn't seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds.

I knew well that people could not fly—as well as anyone knows it—but I also knew the kicker: that, as the books put it, with faith all things are possible.