Quotes By Annie Dillard

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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