Back To Earth Talk Index Dillard, Annie
Pennsylvania-born Annie Dillard was educated at Hollins College in Virginia. She is most noted for her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, and Teaching A Stone to Talk. She also wrote an autobiographical account of her youth, An American Childhood, and a number of other books of prose and poetry.
Catch it if you can. The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone. Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, 1974.
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. Ibid.
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky. Ibid.
"Seems like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why." Ibid.
In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. Ibid.
I live in tranquillity and trembling. Ibid.
The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes. Ibid.
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. Ibid.
Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs. Ibid.
There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life there to a universal chomp. Ibid.
In summer, I stalk. Summer leaves obscure, heat dazzles, and creatures hide from the red-eyed sun, and me. The creatures I seek have several senses and free will; it becomes apparent that they do not wish to be seen. Ibid.
I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone. Ibid.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. Ibid.
The creator is no puritan . . . There is something that profoundly fails to be exuberant about these crawling, translucent lice and white, fat-bodied grubs, but there is an almost manic exuberance about a creator who turns them out, creature after creature after creature, and sets them buzzing and lurking and flying and swimming about. Ibid.
Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz. Ibid.
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? Ibid.
The whole world is an incubator for incalculable numbers of eggs, each one coded minutely and ready to burst. Ibid.
The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without. We vertebrates are living dangerously . . . like so many peeled trees. Ibid.
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. Ibid.