Life & Wisdom Quote by Annie Dillard

Dillard makes geology feel like a secret proof being worked out in the dark. “Arithmetic flowers” is the hinge: the phrase yokes two kinds of beauty we’re trained to keep separate, the organic and the exact. Flowers suggest softness, accident, fragrance, the brief; arithmetic suggests rules, inevitability, and a result you can check. By fusing them, she insists that pattern is not the enemy of wonder but its engine.

The sentence keeps enacting what it describes. “They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane” stacks clauses the way crystals accrete facets, each phrase another surface catching light. Her diction (“awed,” “perfect,” “obedience,” “absolute geometry”) flirts with religious vocabulary, but she relocates reverence from a human altar to matter itself. The subtext is a quiet demotion of us: the universe doesn’t need consciousness to be precise, and perhaps our consciousness is the latecomer.

That parenthetical - “maybe only the stones” - is the slyest cut. It’s not just personification; it’s a challenge to human exceptionalism. If stones “understood,” the understanding wouldn’t be language or self-awareness, but compliance: matter following deep constraints so faithfully it looks like intention. Dillard’s larger project (especially in her nature writing) is to re-train attention until the ordinary world stops being backdrop and starts being the main event. Here, crystals become a rebuke to sloppy metaphor and a defense of astonishment grounded in physical law: the wildness is that there is an “absolute geometry” at all, silently flowering where no one is watching.