Quote

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

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
Faces
Abet
House
Notice
Nature
Complexes
Beautiful
Complex
Play
Witness
Need
Empty
Needs
Creation
Face

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Annie Dillard
Image
Your feelings are none of your business.
Annie Dillard
Image
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
Image
I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.
Annie Dillard
Image
I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
Annie Dillard
Image
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
Annie Dillard
Image
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
Image
There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
Annie Dillard
Image
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
Annie Dillard
Image
Silence is not our heritage but our destiny we live where we want to live.
Annie Dillard
Image
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
Annie Dillard
Image
Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
Annie Dillard
Image
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Annie Dillard
Image
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