You can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARDYou can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARDMountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
ANNIE DILLARDNo one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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 DILLARDOne of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time – give it, give it all, give it now.
ANNIE DILLARDNature is, above all, profligate.
ANNIE DILLARDOur life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
ANNIE DILLARDBooks swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
ANNIE DILLARDYou 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.
ANNIE DILLARDArt is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
ANNIE DILLARDThe world knew you before you knew the world.
ANNIE DILLARDThe secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
ANNIE DILLARDWherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
ANNIE DILLARDNothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
ANNIE DILLARDThere is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
ANNIE DILLARD