Quote

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

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
Formerly
Chickens
Heroic
Generation
Generations
Pure
Times
Always

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.
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
Image
I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
Annie Dillard
Image
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to World. Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Annie Dillard
Image
If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
Annie Dillard
Image
We live in all we seek.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
Annie Dillard
Image
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
Image
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
Annie Dillard
Image
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
Annie Dillard
Image
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
Annie Dillard
Image
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
Image
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Annie Dillard
Image
We still and always want waking.
Annie Dillard
Image
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
Annie Dillard
Image
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard