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I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 30
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
Annie Dillard Doak
Never
Bell
Life
Struck
Bells
Inspiring
Knew
Moment
Moments
Whole
Lifted

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
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By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
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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.
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We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
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Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
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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.
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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Annie Dillard
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I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard