Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek Quotes

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why, " asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?

The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, " then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Innocence is a better world.

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.