“There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”
— Annie Dillard - Holy The Firm (via Into The Wild)
“Perhaps later, when I had become an architect, I would enjoy the latter half of books more.”
— Annie Dillard - American Childhood
“Who could ever tire of this radiant transition, this surfacing to awareness and this deliberate plunging to oblivion—the theater curtain rising and falling? Who could tire of it when the sum of those moments at the edge—the conscious life we so dread losing—is all we have, the gift at the moment of opening it?”
— Annie Dillard - American Childhood
“My parents favored practical jokes of the sort you set up and then retire from, much as one writes books, possibly because imagining people’s reactions beats witnessing them.”
— Annie Dillard - American Childhood
“There was no one here but us fanatics: bird-watchers, infielders, detectives, poets, rock collectors, and, I inferred, specialists in things I had not looked into—violin makers, fishermen, Islamic scholars, opera composers, people who studied Bali, vials of air, bats. It seemed to take all these people working full time to extract the interest from everything and articulate it for the rest of us.”
— Annie Dillard - American Childhood
“There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last.”
— Annie Dillard - American Childhood
