Annie Dillard Quotes

It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all. -Brian Fitzgerald

The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.

The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.

I am just learning to notice the different colors of the stars, and already begin to have a new enjoyment.

When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.

The thing I like about astronomy is being outside at night and seeing the stars in a dark sky. It makes you feel small.

Cammie: I never knew there were this many stars. Zach: I can't see them. I just see you.

Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.

Whenever I do get to look out, it is glorious. Even the stars have a special brightness.

The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

When the light of the star which flows into my eyes as a drop of gold first pierced the darkness in space, there was not a single eye on earth looking at the sky.

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

I can see the stars again m'lady.

There is no light in earth or heaven but the cold light of stars; and the first watch of night is given to the red planet Mars.

I was sat at the bottom of the garden a week ago, smoking a reflective cheroot, thinking about this and that - mostly that, and I just happened to glance at the night sky and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet. In awe I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the void of infinite space wherein the tethered bolts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever in their orbital majesty; and as I looked at all this, I thought, 'I must put a roof on this lavatory.

And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

Look up at the stars and you're gone.