Quotes by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard

American author

Alive from: 1945-

Category: Writers (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 24.

• Annie Dillard

  

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  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.

• Annie Dillard

  

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  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.

• Annie Dillard

  

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

• Annie Dillard

  

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

• Annie Dillard

  

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  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.

• Annie Dillard

  

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  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?".

• Annie Dillard

  

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

• Annie Dillard

  

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  How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

• Annie Dillard

  

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  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.

• Annie Dillard

  

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

• Annie Dillard

  

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

• Annie Dillard

  

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  It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

• Annie Dillard

  

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  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.

• Annie Dillard

  

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  No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

• Annie Dillard

  

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  People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.