Quote

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

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
Sensations
Book
Writing
Love
Barrels
Blinded
Sensation
Spinning
Daring

More quotes by Annie Dillard

Image
[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
Image
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
Annie Dillard
Image
It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
Annie Dillard
Image
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
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
No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
Annie Dillard
Image
Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
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 way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.
Annie Dillard
Image
I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.
Annie Dillard
Image
You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard
Image
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Annie Dillard
Image
if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Annie Dillard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll turn to ashes.
Annie Dillard