Quote

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

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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
Eyes
Eye
Away
Opponent
Without
Ending
Never
Opponents
Would
Admire
World
Walking
Taking

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
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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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The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
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Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
Annie Dillard
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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.
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You can't test courage cautiously.
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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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[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
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Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
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The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
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I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Annie Dillard
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When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
Annie Dillard
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Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a word to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.
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I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Annie Dillard