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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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
Must
Move
Knowing
Possible
Moving
Inspirational
Humanly
Earth
Sleeves
Back
Roll
Nothing
Boundaries
More quotes by Annie Dillard
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
Annie Dillard
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
Annie Dillard
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
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
The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
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
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Annie Dillard
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
No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
Annie Dillard
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
Annie Dillard
