Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
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
-
-
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 -
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
ANNIE DILLARD -
We live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARD -
Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
ANNIE DILLARD -
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
ANNIE DILLARD -
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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 -
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 sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
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 -
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
ANNIE DILLARD -
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 DILLARD -
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
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