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
Triviality
Dying
Persons
Person
Would
Enrage

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
Annie Dillard
Image
I cannot cause light the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
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
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
Image
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
Annie Dillard
Image
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
Annie Dillard
Image
Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard
Image
What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.
Annie Dillard
Image
The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
Annie Dillard
Image
If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?
Annie Dillard
Image
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
Image
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
Annie Dillard
Image
[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
Image
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
Annie Dillard
Image
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
Annie Dillard