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"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."
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"The Peace of Wild ThingsWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
"Every mind should reflect to touch the green of life through trees."
"Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship."
"The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice. So there is magic beyond the Wall after all."
"Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?"
"Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery."
"Mountains in the distance remind me of you."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267)."
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."
"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."
"Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."
"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."
"For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?"
"She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay."
"As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net."
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