Annie Dillard Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

  Annie Dillard

  Inspiring, Prayer, Forever

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.84, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  9 Copy quote

• I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Hands

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.

  Annie Dillard

  Space, Woven, Texture

  10 Copy quote

• Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf

  Annie Dillard

  Tunnels, Faces, Mystery

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.105, Canongate Books

  7 Copy quote

• I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

  Annie Dillard

  Vagabonds, Sojourners, Fugitive

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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Fear, Flower, Rocks

  35 Copy quote

• The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

  Annie Dillard

  Running, Trying, Nowhere To Turn

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

  Annie Dillard

  Time Flies, Doe, Duration

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

  10 Copy quote

• Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

  Annie Dillard

  Morning, Eden, Dust

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.28, Canongate Books

  6 Copy quote

• I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

  Annie Dillard

  Feet, Tennis, Balls

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.102, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  10 Copy quote

• The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Sound

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

  Annie Dillard

  Block, Silence, World

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.65, Canongate Books

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  20 Copy quote

• 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.

  Annie Dillard

  Inspirational, Life, Book

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.88, Canongate Books

  14 Copy quote

• You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.

  Annie Dillard

  Arms, Tests, Ran

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.102, Canongate Books

  10 Copy quote

• I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

  Annie Dillard

  Cutting, Rough Edges, Exit

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.228, Canongate Books

  6 Copy quote

• Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brian: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

  Annie Dillard

  Mean, Cutting, Animal

  14 Copy quote

• The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.

  Annie Dillard

  Rivers, Ecuador, Spectacular

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.56, Canongate Books

  10 Copy quote

• An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

  Annie Dillard

  Lying, Men, Said Life

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.242, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  11 Copy quote

• As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Tangled, Grace

  10 Copy quote

• The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

  Annie Dillard

  Mean, Animal, Interesting

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.21, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

  9 Copy quote

Page 5 of 13

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin