"Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess,...
So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.
More Annie Dillard quotes
"In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except t...
"It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. ...
"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins...
"The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at ...
"All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted we...
"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some inn...
"A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will recor...
"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in ...
"And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth,...
"If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs...
"Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beg...
"I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe tha...
"You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a sla...
"Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of ...