Quote

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within 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
Worlds
Vast
Accidents
Within
Labyrinthine
World
Chipping
Uncovered
Idly
Accident

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
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
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
Image
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?
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
The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
Image
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
Annie Dillard
Image
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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 alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard
Image
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard
Image
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
Image
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
Image
Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
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
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.
Annie Dillard