You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARDYou can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARDThe life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
ANNIE DILLARDThe extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
ANNIE DILLARDEvery live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARDArt is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
ANNIE DILLARDWrite about winter in the summer.
ANNIE DILLARDThe answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
ANNIE DILLARDNothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
ANNIE DILLARDExperiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
ANNIE DILLARDAdverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
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 DILLARDHow 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.
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 DILLARDThe sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
ANNIE DILLARDSpend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
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 DILLARD