Quote

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

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
Enrage
Triviality
Dying
Persons
Person
Would

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
Annie Dillard
Image
Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Annie Dillard
Image
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
Annie Dillard
Image
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.
Annie Dillard
Image
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
Image
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
Annie Dillard
Image
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
Image
Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
Annie Dillard
Image
The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
Image
The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
Image
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard
Image
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
Image
Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard