Annie Dillard Quotes

I happen to hold a bachelor of science degree in geology... And my greatest contribution to the field of science is that I never entered it.

I am a geologist.

As with other phases of nature, I have probably loved the rocks more than I have studied them.

My grandpa was a geologist, and I always had this fascination with not only earth sciences but ancient history.

Geology differs as widely from cosmogony, as speculations concerning the creation of man differ from history.

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.

I used to dig around the sandbox and pull out pieces of coal and show them to my mother, and she used to say that's how I must have known I was going to be a geologist.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

In my junior year, I studied geology on Saturday mornings at the Museum of Natural History. Mineralogy has always been a major interest.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.

Gold delights to walk through the very midst of the guard, and to break its way through hard rocks, more powerful in its blow than lightning.

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?

We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction.

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature; and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.

If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. 'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?' - The Magician's Nephew

I did not feel a particularly strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to find science interesting.

My favorite symbols were those which I didn't understand.

For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors, but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man.

When the uncultured man sees a stone in the road it tells him no story other than the fact that he sees a stone ... The scientist looking at the same stone perhaps will stop, and with a hammer break it open, when the newly exposed faces of the rock will have written upon them a history that is as real to him as the printed page.

Everybody is interesting when they are interested in something.

Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.