Annie Dillard Quotes

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

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.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

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

Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

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.

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

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.

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

You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

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.

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

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

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

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

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

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.

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

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

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.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

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.

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

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

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

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

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.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

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

What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.

When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

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

The world knew you before you knew the world.

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.

I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.