Annie Dillard quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Annie Dillard on Wise Famous Quotes.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves ... my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

It was a clear, picturesque day, a February day without could, without emotion or spirit, like a beautiful women with an empty face.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

Then why did you tell me?

The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home.

He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born.

We still & always want waking.

It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick.

Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.

You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.

Put yourself out of your misery.

The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.

Lick a finger: feel the now.

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance ...

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

An Eskimo shaman said, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls".

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

Anything can happen, and anything does;

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

Are you living just a little and calling that life?

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.

I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it.

They dissolved when I tried to inspect them, or dimmed, or slid dizzyingly away, like a ship's stern yawing down the dark lee slope of a wave.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

Where is privacy, if not in the mind?

No one ever said it would be easy

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do.

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

Admire the world for never ending on you
as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

Life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.

I couldn't unpeach the peaches.

You can't test courage cautiously.

We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

Write as if you were dying.

I could very calmly go wild.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old;

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.

This hospital, like every other, is a hole in the universe through which holiness issues in blasts. It blows both ways, in and out of time.

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

I woke at intervals until ... the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?

Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will?

Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.

The interior life is often stupid.

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.

The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

1. Only a total unself-consciousness will permit me to live with myself (202).

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence ...

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.