Annie Dillard

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door.

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination...

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"

Eskimo: Then why did you tell me?

You can’t test courage cautiously.

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say, “And then I did this and it was so interesting.”

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.

Naming your characters Aristotle and Plato is not going to make their relationship interesting unless you make it so on the page.