"I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. "
— Annie Dillard

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you."
— Annie Dillard

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"Concerning trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air."
— Annie Dillard

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
— Henry David Thoreau

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."
— Henry David Thoreau

"You've such a lovely temperature."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Do anything, but let it produce joy."
— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

"Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools."
— Dave Eggers (You Shall Know Our Velocity!)

"He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her."
— Dave Eggers

"Life begins on the other side of despair."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars."
— Walter Kaufmann (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre)

"if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not."
— Annie Dillard (For the Time Being)

"We live in all we seek."
— Annie Dillard (For the Time Being)

"Talk to me. I'll believe anything."
— Albert Goldbarth