01UndatedEvidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers—seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
02UndatedThe question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
03UndatedThe question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
04UndatedI saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
05UndatedSomewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who 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 Eskimo earnestly 'did you tell me?'Annie Dillard / quote ↗
07UndatedA schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
09UndatedThere 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 / quote ↗
10UndatedWhy do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
13UndatedIt is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
14UndatedThe notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
15UndatedBuddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
16UndatedJust think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
17UndatedThere is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.Annie Dillard / quote ↗
