How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again. (1.24)
What Dillard's talking about here is presence. To be fully engaged with awe is to forget everything but the moment.
Quote #2
But I don't see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness. (2.3)
Dillard makes the argument that lack of education about a thing means the inability to fully appreciate it. On the other hand, there's the old cliché that ignorance is bliss. Can both be true?
Quote #3
So many things have been shown me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free. (4.33)
This is kind of like the idea that parents always have more love to go around; just because you totally love your firstborn doesn't mean you can't love your second just as much. (Younger siblings, take note.)
Quote #4
The light from the moon is awesome, full and wan. It's not the luster of noonday it gives, but the luster of elf-light, utterly lambent and utterly dreamed. (4.37)
Complete opposites can be equally beautiful. We need the beauty of the sun to appreciate the beauty of the moon, and vice versa.
Quote #5
Yes, you say, as if you'd been asleep a hundred years, this is it, this is the real weather, the lavender light fading, the full moisture in your lungs, the heat from the pavement on your lips and palm—not the dry orange dust from horses' hooves, the salt sea, the sour Coke—but this solid air, the blood pumping up your thighs again, your fingers alive. (6.24)
Briefly taking yourself out of your day-to-day environment causes you to see the day-to-day differently upon your return. Dillard compares this to the Orpheus myth, in which the hero descends to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife. (Pro tip: Don't look back.)
Quote #6
You can buy your child a microscope and say grandly, "Look, child, at the Jungle in a Little Drop." The boy looks, plays around with pond water and bread mold and onion sprouts for a month or two, and then starts shooting baskets or racing cars, leaving the microscope on the basement table staring fixedly at its own mirror forever—and you say he's growing up. (7.42)
Growing up might mean a loss of innocence, but it doesn't have to mean a loss of curiosity. We humbly submit that science trumps basketball, although physics does help you make free throws.
Quote #7
All the theories botanists have devised to explain the functions of various leaf shapes tumble under an avalanche of inconsistencies. They simply don't know; can't imagine. (8.23)
Here's one to ponder: Can you know without imagination? Can you imagine without knowledge?
Quote #8
The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them. Because they have a nice dignity, and prefer to have nothing to do with me, not even as the simple objects of my vision. They show me by their very wariness what a prize it is simply to open my eyes and behold. (11.33)
What is it about someone wanting nothing to do with us that makes us want to see them more? As it goes with exes, so it goes with muskrats.
Quote #9
I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place at this moment, with the air so light and wild? (12.31)
This is Annie's reaction to seeing a goldfinch scattering down from a thistle. Watching the way the down floats gives her an insight into the nature of the air. It's all about interconnectedness, people—sometimes you have to look at one thing to see another.
Quote #10
Yes, it's tough, it's tough, that goes without saying. But isn't waiting itself and longing a wonder, being played on by wind, sun, and shade? (12.37)
At least if you're waiting and longing, you know you're alive—you know you still care enough to feel. Not all emotions for which we should be grateful are positive.