"Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess,...
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
~ Annie Dillard ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
More Annie Dillard quotes
"Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?
"An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I th...
"I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: som...
"You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding ...
"In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except t...
"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins...
"The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at ...
"All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted we...
"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some inn...
"A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will recor...
"These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always desc...
"That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we a...
"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in ...
"And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth,...