Quote

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

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
Would
Necessity
Think
Proper
Thinking
Wherever
Life
Positive
Dangle
Pure
Weasels
Takes
Limp
Wells
Obedient
Well
Grasp

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
Image
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard
Image
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
Image
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
Image
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
Annie Dillard
Image
Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Annie Dillard
Image
Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
Annie Dillard
Image
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
Image
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
Image
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
Annie Dillard
Image
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
Image
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
Image
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