Quotes By Annie Dillard

Write about winter in the summer.

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.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

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

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

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

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.

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.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

Write as if you were dying.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

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

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.

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

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