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

"Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you"
— Annie Dillard

"It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everyting, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will."
— Annie Dillard

"I cannot undo the past, but I can make a present taht will diminish its size, see to it that my experience of darkness does not take up more room than it's due."
— Barry Lopez, Resistance

"No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae."
— Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind