Quote

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Annie Dillard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Fit
Paint
Bears
Paints
Certainly
Contents
Doe
Inherited
Self
Fits
World
Servant
Painter

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
Annie Dillard
Image
In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.
Annie Dillard
Image
I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
Annie Dillard
Image
The interior life is often stupid.
Annie Dillard
Image
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
Annie Dillard
Image
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
Annie Dillard
Image
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard
Image
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
Annie Dillard
Image
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
Image
I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
Image
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Annie Dillard
Image
You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
Annie Dillard
Image
I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
Annie Dillard
Image
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
Annie Dillard