At 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.
ANNIE DILLARDThere are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
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 -
The world knew you before you knew the world.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
ANNIE DILLARD -
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARD -
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
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 -
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
ANNIE DILLARD -
You can’t test courage cautiously.
ANNIE DILLARD -
We live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARD -
I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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 -
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
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