Quote

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

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

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
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At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
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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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Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
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Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
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Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
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I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
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The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
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I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
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Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
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Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
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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.
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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?
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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
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Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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