Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
12 quotes
"What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? 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."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"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."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
"Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water."
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters