Quotes from Annie Dillard

Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that "oui" will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.

Our life seems cursed to be a wriggle merely, and a wandering without end.

These statistics, and all the various facts about subatomic particles, quanta, neutrinos, and so forth, constitute in effect the infrared and ultraviolet light at either end of the spectrum. They are too big and too small to see, to understand; they are more or less invisible to me though present, and peripheral to me in a real sense because I do not understand even what I can easily see.

nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

If you can't see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you've looked at enough trees, you've seen a forest, you've got it.

I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place at this moment, with the air so light and wild?

Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form.

There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born.

I didn't obscure anything, I just left it out.

She read books as one would breath air, to fill up and live.

The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament.

I passed under a sugar maple that stunned me by its elegant unself-consciousness: it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea.

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.

although we hear the buzz in our ears and the crashing of jaws at our heels, we can look around as those who are nibbled but unbroken, from the shimmering vantage of the living. Here may not be the cleanest, newest place, but that clean timeless place that vaults on either side of this one is no place at all.

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing.

She reads books as one would create air, to fill up and live

I have no intention of inflicting all my childhood memories on anyone. Far less do I want to excoriate my old teachers who, in their bungling, unforgettable way, exposed me to the natural world, a world covered in chitin, where implacable realities hold sway.

When I came home in the middle of the night I was tired; I longed for a tolerant giant, a person as big as a house, to hold me and rock me.

if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.

The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says in effect, 'No, I don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive.' At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. 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.

If you like metaphysics, throw pots.

Moses' question - the tough one about God's allowing human moral evil - is reasonable only if we believe that a good God causes, or at any rate allows, everything that happens, and that it's all for the best.

Fiction can deal with all the world's objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by methodological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death, love, time, spirit, goodness, evil, destiny, beauty, will.