Quote

The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.

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
Making
Tomatoes
World
Extravagant
Wider
Directions
Raising
Bright
Lazarus
Bitter
Hay
Dangerous
Cain

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
Image
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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
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
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
Image
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
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
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
Image
Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
The interior life is often stupid.
Annie Dillard
Image
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
Image
Skin was earth it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
Annie Dillard
Image
The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
Annie Dillard
Image
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
Annie Dillard