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

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
Forever
Apart
Lasts
Constantly
Downstream
Last
Inspiring
Washed
Given
Lucky
Prayed
Place
Goes
Ripped
Firsts
Present
Freely
Without
Saying
Canvas
First
Prayer
Hasn

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
Image
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Annie Dillard
Image
But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
Image
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
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
Image
At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting
Annie Dillard
Image
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
Image
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
Image
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard
Image
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
Image
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
Image
It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
Image
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
Annie Dillard
Image
The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
Annie Dillard