Annie Dillard citations

Page 2

“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.”

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.”

“Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.”

“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…”

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

“Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance…”

“I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.”

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

“if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.”

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.”

“I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.”

“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

“He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.”

“The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.”

“Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?”

“Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

“Whenever a work's structure is intentionally one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.”

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

“Outright predators, of course, I understand. I am among them. There is no denying that the feats of predators can be just as gruesome as those of the unlovely parasites: the swathing and sipping of trapped hummingbirds by barn spiders, the occasional killing and eating of monkeys by chimpanzees. If I were to eat as the delicate ladybug eats, I would go through in just nine days the entire population of Boys Town. Nevertheless, the most rapacious lurk and charge of any predator is not nearly so sinister as the silent hatching of barely visible, implanted eggs. With predators, at least you have a chance.”

“Even such sophisticated mammals as the great predator cats occasionally eat their cubs. A mother cat will be observed licking the area around the umbilical cord of the helpless newborn. She licks, she licks, she licks until something snaps in her brain, and she begins eating, starting there, at the vulnerable belly.”