Teaching a Stone to Talk

Quotes from Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk

pg 32- A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. we positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right- believe it or not- to be people.
Who can believe it?

pg 72- The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. it is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. We might sa well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived, for the Amazon basin, which covers half a continent, and for the life that- there, like anything else- is always and necessarily lived in detail: on the tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking this particular white-fleshed guava in this particular pattern of shade.

pg 77- The Napo River: it is not out of the way. It is in the way, catching sunlight the way a cup catches poured water; it is a bowl of sweet air, a basin of greenness, and of grace, and, it would seem, of peace.

pg 110- What if we the people had the sense or grace to live as cooled islands in an archipelago, live, with dignity, passion, and no comment?