Quote

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

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
Learning
Keep
Thing

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
Annie Dillard
Image
If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
Annie Dillard
Image
Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
Annie Dillard
Image
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
Annie Dillard
Image
You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical the page is made of time and matter the page always wins.
Annie Dillard
Image
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Annie Dillard
Image
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
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
We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
Annie Dillard
Image
Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
Image
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
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 still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one
Annie Dillard
Image
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
Annie Dillard
Image
I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
Annie Dillard
Image
Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Annie Dillard
Image
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard