{"author":"Annie Dillard","author_id":"Annie+Dillard","total_quotes":173,"quotes":[{"text":"When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["death","innocence"],"id":8422,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. \tYou are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. \t“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":16223,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Why 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.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["writing","writing-craft","writing-inspiration"],"id":23158,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"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.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["work"],"id":24792,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. ","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["religion","science","space","whale"],"id":30900,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":32108,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["life","living"],"id":36895,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["books","readers-and-writers","reading","writing","writing-craft","writing-process"],"id":37578,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"The higher Christian churches...Come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["christianity","church","god","high-church","low-church"],"id":41357,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . So that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["reading","writing"],"id":43664,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":173,"pages":18,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}