Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

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If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good.

Annie Dillard
Tonight I walked around the pond scaring frogs; a couple of them jumped off, going, in effect, eek, and most grunted, and the pond was still. But one big frog, bright green like a poster-paint frog, didn't jump, so I waved my arm and stamped to scare it, and it jumped suddenly, and I jumped, and then everything in the pond jumped, and I laughed and laughed.

Annie Dillard
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

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?

Annie Dillard
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Annie Dillard
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...

Annie Dillard
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.

Annie Dillard
I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Annie Dillard
I think that the dying pray at the last not 'please,' but 'thank you,' as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

Annie Dillard
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet.

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
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

Annie Dillard
The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.

Annie Dillard
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Annie Dillard