Annie Dillard Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

  Annie Dillard

  Prayer, Wings, Water

  20 Copy quote

• The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

  Annie Dillard

  Made, Jest, Earnest

  ANNIE DILLARD (1974). “PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK”

  8 Copy quote

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

  Annie Dillard

  Beach, Ocean, Sea

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.67, Canongate Books

  17 Copy quote

• Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.

  Annie Dillard

  Nature, Believe, Autumn

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.66, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  17 Copy quote

• I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.

  Annie Dillard

  Home, Garden, Thinking

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.109, Canongate Books

  26 Copy quote

• Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

  Annie Dillard

  Inspirational, Life, Time

  58 Copy quote

• I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

  Annie Dillard

  Want, Hard

  5 Copy quote

• I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Fall, Airplane

  ANNIE DILLARD (1974). “PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK”

  20 Copy quote

• When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

  Annie Dillard

  Real, Writing, Years

  Annie Dillard (2009). “The Writing Life”, p.3, Harper Collins

  7 Copy quote

• You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.

  Annie Dillard

  Pain, Drunk, Interesting

  6 Copy quote

• Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

  Annie Dillard

  All Things

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.87, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

• Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

  Annie Dillard

  Survival, Survivor, Emergencies

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.9, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  23 Copy quote

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

  Annie Dillard

  Memories, Work, Writing

  11 Copy quote

• All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

  Annie Dillard

  Oxygen, Blood, Iron

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.127, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  5 Copy quote

• There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

  Annie Dillard

  Sweet, Good Life, Reading

  11 Copy quote

• She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Taken, Loss

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.114, Canongate Books

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Annie Dillard

  Gears, Belief, Desks

  Annie Dillard (2009). “The Writing Life”, p.11, Harper Collins

  13 Copy quote

• Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

  Annie Dillard

  Reading, Inspire, Mind

  21 Copy quote

• It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

  Annie Dillard

  Powerful, Firsts, Glances

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.122, Canongate Books

  6 Copy quote

• [Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.

  Annie Dillard

  Eye, Yellow, Brain

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.65, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  16 Copy quote

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

  Annie Dillard

  Song, Voice, Whirlwind

  17 Copy quote

• Are you living just a little and calling that life?

  Annie Dillard

  Simple, Calling, Littles

  5 Copy quote

• I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

  Annie Dillard

  Sea, Skins, Dolphins

  Annie Dillard (1989). “An American childhood”

  9 Copy quote

• I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Fierce, Remember

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.41, Canongate Books

  9 Copy quote

• I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Positive, Thinking

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.53, Canongate Books

  7 Copy quote

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