If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go ... everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek