Annie Dillard Quotes About Water

Quotes about: Water

• 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

• One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Play

  "The Writing Life". Book by Annie Dillard, archive.nytimes.com. 1989.

• It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.

  Annie Dillard

  Running, Believe, Book

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.69, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

  Annie Dillard

  Eye, Fire, Flames

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.11, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

  Annie Dillard

  Prayer, Wings, Water

• After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

  Annie Dillard

  Eye, Fire, Flames

  "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek". Book by Annie Dillard, 1974.

• All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

  Annie Dillard

  Oxygen, Blood, Iron

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.127, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

  Annie Dillard

  Keys, Sea, Water

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.92, Canongate Books

• Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

  Annie Dillard

  Nature, Eye, Water

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.18, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

• We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Sleep, Water

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.29, Canongate Books

• The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Nature, Freedom

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