"On a shore, eight thousand waves break a day. James Trefil provides these facts. At any one time, the foam from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth's surface. This acreage of foam - using the figure 4 percent - is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population, in other words, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth's people as breaking waves' foam is to the planet's surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more space than waves' foam." - Annie Dillar

"I find the following three approaches to the mystery of human numbers hilarious. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not comprehend the fuss. What was the big deal? David von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: "I mean, there are so many people."
One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, discovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged perfectly tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England's Lake District.
Recently, in the Peruvian Amazon region, a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, "Isn't it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?" - Annie Dillard

"In tropical South America live the Kogi Indians. They say, as Michael Parfit tells it, that when an infant begins life, it knows three things: mother, night and water." - Annie Dillard

"Now it is a city hospital on a Monday morning . . .
THere might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashing boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out." - Annie Dillard

"Not only could I not find the snake head, I also lost the hawk moth, which flew over the wall, I think, down the slope, toward the sea of Galilee." - Annie Dillard

"One-tenth of the land on earth is tundra. At any time it is raining on only 3 percent of the planet's surface. Lightning strikes the planet about one hundred times every second. For every one of us living people, including every newborn the moment it appears, there are roughly one thousand pounds of termites. Our chickens outnumber us four to one . . .
A hundred million f us are children who live on the streets. A hundred twenty million live in countries where we were not born. Twenty-three illion of us are refugees. Sixteen million of us live in Cairo. Twelve million fish for a living from small boats. Seven and a half million of us are Uygurs. One million of us crew on freezer trawlers. Two thousand of us a day commit suicide . . .
Los Angeles airport has twenty-five thousand parking spaces. This is about one space for every person who died in 1985 in Colombia when a volcano erupted. This is one space each for two years' worth of accidental kilings from land mines left over from recent wars. At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport parking lot all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Toykyo in March, 1945, or all the world's dead from two atomic bombs, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, the corpses of Burundians killed in civil war since 1993. Youcould not fit America's homeless there, however, even at eighteen or nineteen to a car." - Annie Dillard

"While he was writing this record in his room, he heard 'every now and then the deathwatch ticking. It goes for a few seconds at a time.' The deathwatch is only a beetle." - Annie Dillard

"And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and devliering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said, 'Thank you, shack.' Then I added, 'Blah,'with a little grin, because I knew that hte shack adn that the mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail and back to this world." - Jack Kerouac

"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in china. To get a feel for what htis means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity and love - and multiply it by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it." - Annie Dillard

"The baby generously extended to me a key ring. I could not help but notice that several hundred Yemenis, the baby's father or brother doubtless somewhere among them, abruptly stopped moving to watch. I took the key ring, held it in sight, and thanked the baby, the way one does. The several hundred Yemenis held their breaths. I know they were holding their breaths because when - after stretching the interval until the first instant the baby began, visibly at the eyebrows, to doubt life's very fundaments - I handed the key ring back, they all exhaled at once; I could hear it." - Annie Dillard

"There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this." - Annie Dillard

"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light!" - Edna St. Vincent Millay

"More people have died fishing, I read once, than at any other human activity including war." - Annie Dillard

"We encounter people, often tangentially. Leaving for Israel, I met a skycap at the airport. He was a hefty man in his sixties, whose face was bashed in. He imitated Elvis. It was just the two of us, standing at the curb; I was smoking a cigarette. As Elvis, he looked at me sidelong from slitty, puffed eyes, and sang,
Love me tender, love me sweet
Never let me go.
You have made my life complete,
And I love you so.
THen he slurred, 'Thank you very much - just kidding.'
He began again abruptly: "This is Howard Cosell, The Wide World of Sports. Just kidding." . . .
'My wife says I'm dain-bramaged,' he said, and looked at me sideways to see if I'd heard it.
'Just kidding,' he said. 'THank you very much.'" - Annie Dillard

"When the liturgy ended, most men removed their shawls and phylacteries and left; a few lingered to study. Later, if the boy saw a book still open on a bench, he spread a prayer shawl to cover its open pages. In his world, people respected books. When a book wore out, they buried it like a person." - Annie Dillard