Quote

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

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
Time
Knocked
Like
Glances
Seen
Seeing
Powerful
Less
Firsts
Breathless
First
Glance

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
Image
I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
Annie Dillard
Image
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
Image
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard
Image
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
Image
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
Annie Dillard
Image
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
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
Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
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