You can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARDYou can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARDOur life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
ANNIE DILLARDShe read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
ANNIE DILLARDWe have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
ANNIE DILLARDExperiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
ANNIE DILLARDI 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.
ANNIE DILLARDWrite about winter in the summer.
ANNIE DILLARDI had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
ANNIE DILLARDWe live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARDThe world knew you before you knew the world.
ANNIE DILLARDYou can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARDHe 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.
ANNIE DILLARDThe dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
ANNIE DILLARDYou’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
ANNIE DILLARDI 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.
ANNIE DILLARDEvery live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD