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

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
Conditions
Dies
Point
Moments
Certain
Vouchsafed
Doe
Inexplicable
Live
Duration
Time
Reckless

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
Image
Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
Annie Dillard
Image
I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
Image
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie Dillard
Image
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
Annie Dillard
Image
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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
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
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
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
The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
Image
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Annie Dillard
Image
I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Annie Dillard
Image
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Annie Dillard
Image
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
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