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Annie Dillard Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from Annie Dillard


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


The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.


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


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


There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.


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


How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.


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.


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


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


The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.


People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.


You can't test courage cautiously.


The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.


Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.' Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'


There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.


Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?


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.


The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.


Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.