Annie Dillard - An American Childhood (1987)

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I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

Annie Dillard
Pittsburgh wasn't really Andrew Carnegie's town. We just thought it was. Steel wasn't the only major industry in Pittsburgh. We just had to think to recall the others.

Annie Dillard
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

Annie Dillard
I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.

Annie Dillard
Fingering insects was touching the rim of nightmare. But you have to study something. I never considered turning away from them just because I was afraid of them.

Annie Dillard
The blinding sway of their inner lives makes children immoral.

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

Annie Dillard
Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

Annie Dillard
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch—with an electric hiss and cry—this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

Annie Dillard
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

Annie Dillard
Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel.

Annie Dillard
Loss came with the seasons, blew into the house when you opened the windows, piled up in the bottom desk and dresser drawers, accumulated in the back of closets, heaped in the basement starting by the furnace, and came creeping up the basement stairs. Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings.

Annie Dillard
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

Annie Dillard
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Annie Dillard
Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

Annie Dillard
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

Annie Dillard
There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth — fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.

Annie Dillard
Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

Annie Dillard
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?

Annie Dillard
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.

Annie Dillard
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

Annie Dillard
Living, you stand under a waterfall.... What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling! It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

Annie Dillard