Quote

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

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
Every
Kind
Emergency
Extended
Emergencies
Survivor
Survival
Live
Thing

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
Annie Dillard
Image
The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
Image
The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.
Annie Dillard
Image
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
Annie Dillard
Image
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
Annie Dillard
Image
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
Image
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
Image
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
Annie Dillard
Image
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television they prefer books.
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
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
Image
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
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
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
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
Annie Dillard
Image
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
Annie Dillard
Image
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Annie Dillard
Image
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