Quote

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

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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
Hard
Familiar
Thinking
Stones
Planet
Dear
Sojourners
Planets
Hearth
Garden
Alternate
Land
Exile
Home
Stone

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.
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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
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The interior life is often stupid.
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We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
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The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
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Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?
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I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
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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.
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Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had. Day after day I had noticed that if I waited long enough, my strong unexpressed joy would dwindle and dissipate inside me, like a fire subsiding . . . . Just this once I wanted to let it rip.
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Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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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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I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
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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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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
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The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
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The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
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People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
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