Quotes By Annie Dillard

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

Write as if you were dying.

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

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.

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

The writer studies literature, not the world.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.