Annie Dillard
44 quotes
Biography
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir.
"She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live."
"Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you."
"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?"
"You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it."
"The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all."
"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them."
"I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs."
"Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?"
"The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail."
"Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts"shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water."
"Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls' schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you."
"I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way."
"Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."
"[M]any carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can't flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs. People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn't close them. Ants don't even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite."
"No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe."
"The surest sign of age is loneliness."
"There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable."
"It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere."
"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."
"Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone."
"As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker."
"It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution."
"You can't test courage cautiously."
"I would like to learn, or remember, how to live."