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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

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
Sojourner
Sojourners
Vagabond
Vagabonds
Fugitive
Signs
Seeking

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The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
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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.
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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.
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If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
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We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
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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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You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
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When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
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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.
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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.
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Put yourself out of your misery.
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You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Annie Dillard
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why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
Annie Dillard
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Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
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If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?
Annie Dillard
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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
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Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.
Annie Dillard
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I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
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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