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The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

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
Seen
Seek
Creatures

More quotes by Annie Dillard

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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
Annie Dillard
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Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.
Annie Dillard
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These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Annie Dillard
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For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
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It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
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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All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
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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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Annie Dillard
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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.
Annie Dillard
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What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Annie Dillard
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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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When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
Annie Dillard
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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
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Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
Annie Dillard
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I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
Annie Dillard
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I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Annie Dillard
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Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot our planet alone has death.
Annie Dillard
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We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
Annie Dillard
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I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
Annie Dillard