Quote

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

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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
Like
Given
Painlessly
Remember
Noticing
Live
Pointed
Everything
Remembering
Nothing
Choosing
Would
Fierce
Time
Open
Life
Death

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
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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.
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No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.
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I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
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[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
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But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
Annie Dillard
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I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
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Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
Annie Dillard
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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
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A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
Annie Dillard
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The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Annie Dillard
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When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
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Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Annie Dillard
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If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
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Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
Annie Dillard
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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
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You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard