Annie Dillard Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Reflection, Water

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.16, Canongate Books

• She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Taken, Loss

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.114, Canongate Books

• By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

  Annie Dillard

  Prayer, Children, Thinking

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.126, Canongate Books

• 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. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Long, Age

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.107, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• It's about waking up. A child wakes up over and over again, and notices that she's living. She dreams along, loving the exuberant life of the senses, in love with beauty and power, oblivious to herself -- and then suddenly, bingo, she wakes up and feels herself alive. She notices her own awareness. And she notices that she is set down here, mysteriously, in a going world.

  Annie Dillard

  Dream, Children, Loving Life

• 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

  Children, Years, World

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.16, Canongate Books

• Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.

  Annie Dillard

  Time, Children, Ascending

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.77, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Children, Culture

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.17, Canongate Books

• No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Brain, Trying

  Annie Dillard (1992). “The living”, Thorndike Pr

• Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Wonder, Surprise

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.147, Canongate Books

• Possibly everyone now dead considered his own death as a freak accident, a mistake. Some bad luck caused it. Every enterprising man jack of them, and every sunlit vigorous woman and child, too, who had seemed so alive and pleased, was cold as a meat hook, and new chattering people trampled their bones unregarding, and rubbed their hands together and got to work improving their prospects till their own feet slipped and they went under themselves ... Every place was a tilting edge.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Mistake, Men

  Annie Dillard (1994). “The Annie Dillard reader”, Harpercollins

• We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Lying, Color

• Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

  Annie Dillard

  Baby, Children, Book

• The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Innocence, Beast

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.91, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Wall, Men

  Annie Dillard (2010). “For the Time Being”, p.123, Vintage

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