Quote

Make connections let rip and dance where you can.

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
Rip
Connections
Dance
Make

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
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
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.
Annie Dillard
Image
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Annie Dillard
Image
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
Image
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Annie Dillard
Image
Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.
Annie Dillard
Image
Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
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 would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
Image
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
Image
How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.
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
Image
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
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
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
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
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
The world knew you before you knew the world.
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
Annie Dillard