How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It's not that I'm observant; it's just that I talk too much. (2.31)
Verbalization isn't always the key to understanding what you see, but it can be. It can also, however, be a giant distraction.
Quote #2
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. (2.38)
This is Annie's reaction to seeing the tree with lights in it. It's the first time in the book she realizes that the universe only shows you what you've been searching for when you stop searching.
Quote #3
It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. (4.32)
To be set in your ways is to ignore your own mind. Fixedness, as Dillard defines it, is the opposite of curiosity.
Quote #4
Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. In fact, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens at all. […]
Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. (6.14-15)
Okay, here are the steps: (1) Decide what you want to see; (2) put yourself in the right environment to see it; (3) give yourself wholeheartedly to seeing; (4) bask in enlightenment. You're welcome.
Quote #5
But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can't recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. (6.25)
You know how some mornings you wake up and the feelings from a dream are still with you, even if you can't remember the details? Just because something happened in the past doesn't mean we're not still living in it.
Quote #6
Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows and vanishes. This is your life. (8.53)
Dillard's using words like a microscope here, zooming in and out on geography and time.
Quote #7
But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. (10.58)
Non-human creatures might be brutal, but this doesn't give humans the right to be as well. With consciousness, comes responsibility.
Quote #8
I retreat—not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone. (11.58)
Here's a real-world example: riding a roller coaster. When you grit your teeth and hold your breath, the ride seems much scarier. When you relax and put your hands in the air, it becomes a lot more fun, and when it stops, you may even find you want to ride again.
Quote #9
I didn't know, I never have known, what spirit it is that descends into my lungs and flaps near my heart like an eagle rising. I named it full-of-wonder, highest good, voices. (12.49)
These could also be other names for God.
Quote #10
The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act…It is merely the slow cessation of the will's sprints and the intellect's chatter; it is waiting like a hollow bell with stilled tongue…The waiting itself is the thing. (14.49)
Sometimes inspiration hits you unexpectedly in the middle of the night, but you're much more likely to finish a book if you show up at your desk every day no matter what.