The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
ANNIE DILLARDPeople 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.
More Annie Dillard Quotes
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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 -
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
ANNIE DILLARD -
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
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 -
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 -
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
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 -
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
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 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 -
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 -
There 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.
ANNIE DILLARD