We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...Annie Dillard
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil.Annie Dillard
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.Annie Dillard
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.Annie Dillard
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed bits I keep together with my own two hands, and am full of fun, like a builder of tree houses.Annie Dillard
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.Annie Dillard
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.Annie Dillard
I have been thinking about the earth and I wanted to see it before it was wrecked.Annie Dillard
It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time... but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.Annie Dillard
The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of the sunlighted minnow, is not that it all fits together like clockwork–for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl– but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.Annie Dillard