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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
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
Beauty
Reading
Hope
Probed
Life
Heightened
Bare
Deepest
Laid
Mystery
More quotes by Annie Dillard
Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
Annie Dillard
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Annie Dillard
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Annie Dillard
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
Annie Dillard
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Annie Dillard
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Annie Dillard
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
Annie Dillard
[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.
Annie Dillard
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Annie Dillard
But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Annie Dillard
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Annie Dillard
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
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
Annie Dillard
Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
Annie Dillard
