Annie Dillard quotes - page 3

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. (Annie Dillard)
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. View quote
Annie Dillard
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? View quote
Annie Dillard
Write about winter in the summer. View quote
Annie Dillard
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves. View quote
Annie Dillard
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. View quote
Annie Dillard
He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know. View quote
Annie Dillard
I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read. View quote
Annie Dillard
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. View quote
Annie Dillard
According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body. View quote
Annie Dillard
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. (Annie Dillard)
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. View quote
Annie Dillard
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us. View quote
Annie Dillard
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. View quote
Annie Dillard
Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip. View quote
Annie Dillard
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. View quote
Annie Dillard
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. View quote
Annie Dillard
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone. View quote
Annie Dillard
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus. View quote
Annie Dillard
We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. View quote
Annie Dillard
I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. (Annie Dillard)
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life. View quote
Annie Dillard
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. View quote
Annie Dillard
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent. View quote
Annie Dillard
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. View quote
Annie Dillard