Quote

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.

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
Switches
Switch
Asleep
Fancy
Deeply
Control

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
Image
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
Annie Dillard
Image
Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard
Image
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
Annie Dillard
Image
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
Image
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.
Annie Dillard
Image
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
Annie Dillard
Image
By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
Annie Dillard
Image
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
Annie Dillard
Image
I would like to live. . . open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Annie Dillard
Image
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
Image
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard
Image
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
Annie Dillard
Image
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Annie Dillard
Image
poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
Annie Dillard