Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
This is how I feel about a lot of people, a lot of the time.
As I walked along the grassy edge of the island, I got better and better at seeing frogs both in and out of the water. I learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog.
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
propose to keep here what Thoreau called “a meteorological journal of the mind,” telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
This is how I feel about my current life, that I am in an uninterrupted state of my own “meterological journal” of the mind. My blog does that too, it tells some tales and describes some of the sights of of this rather tamed valley and exploring the unmapped reaches and unholy fastnesses
On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water. It carries its own lights.
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
t if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will liter-ally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
On the choice to live this specific way
Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
Yes, it is.
Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling.
Annie Dillard • Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pdf).pdf
This is the stumble.