No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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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 -
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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 -
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
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 -
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
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 -
Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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 -
We live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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 -
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
ANNIE DILLARD -
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
ANNIE DILLARD -
He 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 DILLARD -
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful
ANNIE DILLARD -
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
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 -
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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