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"I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair."
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"It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature."

"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."

"What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth."

"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."

"Human psychology is the most mysterious thing in the world."

"The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence."

"Mankind willfully changing the global electromagnetic radiation environment has created what I expect will become known as the man-made evolution era."

"The toxicity of medical and industrial gas to the human depends on where it is used. A gas that is regarded as safe in a well ventilated environment at sea level may be a toxic gas in an indoor environment at high altitude."
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 most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."


"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."


"Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."


"I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world's coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?"


"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."


"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."


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


"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."
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