Annie Dillard Quotes

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.

Put yourself out of your misery.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.

I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

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.

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.

Write as if you are dying.

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

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.

I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.

Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.

Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.