Annie Dillard Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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).
How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.
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.
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.
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.
Admire the world for never ending on you
as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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.
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
I woke at intervals until ... the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.