Annie Dillard: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”

“We live in all we seek.”

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.”

“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

“Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.”

“The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?”

“I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.”

“It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.”

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”

“I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.”

“Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.”

“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

“We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.”

“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”

“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. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”

“Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.”