Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
ANNIE DILLARDAt a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
ANNIE DILLARD -
One 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 -
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I 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 DILLARD -
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Nature is, above all, profligate.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
ANNIE DILLARD -
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
ANNIE DILLARD -
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Wherever 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 DILLARD -
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
ANNIE DILLARD -
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
ANNIE DILLARD -
We live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Write about winter in the summer.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The 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 DILLARD -
Mountains 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 DILLARD -
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
ANNIE DILLARD -
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
ANNIE DILLARD