Annie Dillard

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

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?

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?

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.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.

You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?