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
Thing
Every
Kind
Emergency
Extended
Emergencies
Survivor
Survival
Live

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
Annie Dillard
Image
I couldn't unpeach the peaches.
Annie Dillard
Image
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Annie Dillard
Image
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
Image
The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.
Annie Dillard
Image
Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.
Annie Dillard
Image
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
Annie Dillard
Image
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
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
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
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 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
The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard
Image
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Annie Dillard
Image
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Annie Dillard
Image
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
Image
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
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
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
Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Annie Dillard