Annie Dillard Quotes

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.

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

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.

Write about winter in the summer.

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

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

There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

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

I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

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.

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

Your feelings are none of your business.

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

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

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

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.

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

Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.

We still and always want waking.

How you spend your days is how you spend your life.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

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

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

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

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

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.

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?

The interior life is often stupid.

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

poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.

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

Are you living just a little and calling that life?

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

People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

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.

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

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

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

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

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

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

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.