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Annie Dillard QUOTES

Annie Dillard QUOTES

181 " I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

182 " I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

183 " No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

184 " 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. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

185 " All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

186 " why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over? "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood

187 " The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs. "

― Annie Dillard , The Writing Life

188 " 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? "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood

189 " I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

190 " When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one. "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood

191 " You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work. "

― Annie Dillard , Holy the Firm

192 " Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire. "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood

193 " Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. "

― Annie Dillard , Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

194 " Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetimes as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life....Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still. "

― Annie Dillard , The Writing Life

195 " I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood

196 " I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

197 " Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden. "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood

198 " I center down - I retreat, not inside myself, but outside myself. ... Self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we don't waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

199 " The creatures I seek do not want to be seen. "

― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

200 " If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't? "

― Annie Dillard , An American Childhood