Quote

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

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
Moment
Sphere
Feelings
Spheres
Moments
Electric
Important
Opening
Life
Cry
Speckled
World
Touch
Hiss
Present
Mineral
Feeling
Minerals

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Annie Dillard
Image
Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
Image
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
Annie Dillard
Image
I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
Annie Dillard
Image
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
Annie Dillard
Image
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair... or go into business. You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
Annie Dillard
Image
The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
Annie Dillard
Image
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
Image
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Annie Dillard
Image
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
Image
I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
Annie Dillard
Image
I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. It's completely different.
Annie Dillard
Image
No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
Image
There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.
Annie Dillard
Image
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
Annie Dillard
Image
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
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
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
Annie Dillard