Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
ANNIE DILLARDAdverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
ANNIE DILLARDWherever 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 DILLARDNature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
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.
ANNIE DILLARDThe 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 DILLARDYou can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.
ANNIE DILLARDEvery live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
ANNIE DILLARDWe live in all we seek.
ANNIE DILLARDBooks swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
ANNIE DILLARDThese are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
ANNIE DILLARDI 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 DILLARDExperiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
ANNIE DILLARDOur life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
ANNIE DILLARDThere is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
ANNIE DILLARDWrite about winter in the summer.
ANNIE DILLARDOne 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